Kossoff, for His Connoisseurs Only

Six years ago, when the 400th anniversary of the birth of French painter Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) was celebrated in Paris at a large and magnificent exhibition at the Grand Palais, local newspapers fretted over what turned out to be relative public indifference to the event. As recounted by art historian Katie Scott in the recent book “Commemorating Poussin: Reception and Interpretation of the Artist,” the general public reacted with a yawn to what should have been a major cultural event--especially for a classical painter who is a stock figure of French elementary school education and thus inseparable from the lives of every French citizen.

A pair of newly opened exhibitions at the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art have Poussin as their pivot, but they aren’t likely to ignite the popular imagination either--although for different reasons. For one thing, Americans claim no direct affiliation to or ascendancy from the painter, who was central to the political and cultural maturation of France in the 17th century.

The two shows, however, do mean to establish a bridge between the past and the present. Their shared subject is the extensive recent series of pastel and charcoal drawings and various prints, some hand-painted with watercolor, executed by the respected British painter Leon Kossoff, 73, in direct response to the 1994 Poussin retrospective. But these wan and uninvolving shows turn out to be a kind of “inside baseball,” likely to be of interest only to die-hard Kossoff connoisseurs.

And as an admirer of his work in the past, I wonder even about that.

At LACMA, 15 drawings and 28 prints are shown alongside thumbnail reproductions of the Poussin paintings on which they are based. At the Getty, five drawings and 12 prints are joined by the two Poussin paintings from which they derive.

One is the museum’s own luminously serene vision of a rationally ordered universe, “Landscape With a Calm” (1651). The other is “Landscape With a Man Killed by a Snake” (1648), borrowed from London’s Poussin-rich National Gallery; the Arcadian vista in this painting is dramatically interrupted in the foreground by what appears to be a random episode of nature’s violence: A black snake coils around a lifeless body, a man flees in terror and a woman falls to her knees aghast.

Kossoff’s 1977 oil painting “Booking Hall, Killburn Underground Station, No. 2” is also here, and it’s a rather good example of the kind of work on which the artist’s reputation rests. A linear painting style (indebted to drawing) is cobbled from great hunks of paint that seem dragged, scraped and laboriously built up across the surface of the canvas. Hunched, ashen, blank-eyed figures lurch through the cavernous but flattened space of the subway hall, poised between volatility and restraint, intense compression tugging at potential explosiveness.

In other words, Kossoff is a distinctly urban painter. His best pictures chronicle the anxieties of modern city life. That he had trouble coming to terms with the pastoral landscape of the Getty’s Poussin is no surprise, and these particular prints and drawings are the dullest in either show.

Kossoff’s paper interpretations of Poussin do not reveal an interest in the specifics of classical literature and Catholic theology that were central to Poussin’s artistic project--nor is there any reason they should. Whether Poussin’s choice of narrative is familiar, like “The Rape of the Sabines” (1637) or “The Lamentation Over the Dead Christ” (1656-58), or utterly obscure, like the “Landscape With Pyramus and Thisbe” (circa 1651) or “The Testament of Eudamidas,” it’s the gnawing tension between the dramatic and the tedious, the orgiastic and the mundane, the chaotic and the controlled that seems to explain Kossoff’s attraction to Poussin’s art.

The trouble is, there’s almost no way to know this from either exhibition. The prints and drawings he produced are themselves ordinary--important perhaps to Kossoff’s ongoing development as a painter, but not distinguished by themselves. Should the thorough and lengthy encounter between the British artist and his French predecessor subsequently produce a compelling body of paintings, then it would perhaps be instructive to examine these works on paper to see how he got there.

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Retrospective curiosity is, for example, the reason to marvel at Edgar Degas’ monumental canvas “The Rape of the Sabines (After Poussin)” (1861-63), which hangs in Pasadena’s Norton Simon Museum. On its own it’s simply an accomplished copy. In the context of the Simon’s exceptional collection of Degas’ mature paintings, drawings and sculptures, however, it’s fascinating to examine his careful absorption of Poussin’s problem-solving approach toward a philosophically minded fullness of experience, and to speculate on what it meant for Degas’ equally amazing art.

But why study Kossoff’s uninspiring prints and drawings from Poussin now--especially in the absence of substantial paintings? No doubt unintentionally, these shows come across as some sort of dubious, academically minded admonition to current artists to Pay attention to past masters! The drawings (if not the prints) display a certain formal verve, but that’s hardly enough to carry one exhibition let alone two.

Indeed, as museum efforts these shows feel thin. The flimsiness is underscored by the absence of a publication at either one. (Visitors are referred instead to a recent volume on Kossoff’s work by the prominent Degas scholar Richard Kendall, sponsored by the artist’s local gallery.) Exhibition catalogs don’t always turn out well, of course, but for a museum they represent a level of serious scholarly commitment to an artist and his work that ought to be expected.

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* “Drawn to Painting: Leon Kossoff’s Drawings and Prints After Nicolas Poussin,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 857-6000, through April 2. Closed Wednesday.

* “Poussin Landscapes by Leon Kossoff,” J. Paul Getty Museum, 1200 Getty Center Drive, through April 16; parking reservations: (310) 440-7300. Closed Monday.