I tell the insurance man and suddenly I'm rich. Every few weeks a few coppers for the insurance man. readers really need old Jewish stories as retold by a British Myron Cohen? Well, here it is: Kossoff has raided Nathan Ausubel's venerable collection, Jewish Folklore and Jewish Humor, has plucked out a few nice fat stories and jokes, has padded them a little, and voilâ€¦: ''Forty years, with never a penny to spare. He also repeatedly captured the Willesden area of north-west London, where he moved in the 1960s - especially its many railways (trains, stations, junctions and bridges are common subjects).With Leo Rosten and Sam Levenson and so many others, do U.S. Kossoff, by contrast, is best known for his depictions of Christ Church Spitalfields, Nicholas Hawksmoor’s stunning Baroque church near the artist’s childhood home in east London. Auerbach has focused on scenes around his Camden studio, including the parkland of Primrose Hill. They’re also associated with different parts of London. Where Kossoff always preferred to work on board, Auerbach frequently uses canvas. Late in life, Kossoff turned down a CBE, for example, just as Auerbach did a knighthood. Similarities between the pair can seem endless. Over the years, as increased success came their way, both painters adopted more vivid colouring. Given the sheer amount of paint they used, they couldn’t really afford brighter, more expensive colours. In part this was an aesthetic decision, inspired by artists such as Rembrandt, but it was also a practical one. ‘I would sit for an hour and Leon would paint me, and then Leon would sit for an hour and I’d paint him - and so we went on all day, turn and turn about’ - Frank Auerbach

‘We wanted something… not so linear and illustrative.’ ‘Leon and I were perhaps a bit rougher… than the other students,’ Auerbach recalled in 1990. They soon formed a close and collaborative relationship, often visiting the bomb sites and building sites of post-war London together in search of artistic inspiration.īoth also grew disenchanted by the rigid, academic teaching at Saint Martin’s.

Following military service abroad, Kossoff returned in 1948 to study at Saint Martin’s School of Art, where he first met Auerbach, who’d recently arrived from Kent. Kossoff was Jewish too, born and raised in London to Ukrainian parents who had fled anti-Semitic pogroms at the turn of the 20th century. He enrolled at a boarding school in Kent and never saw his parents - who were killed by the Nazis - again. Born in Berlin to a bourgeois Jewish family (his father was a lawyer), Auerbach was eight when his parents sent him to England in 1939, benefiting from a Quaker scheme to send Jewish children to safety.

Small Town Is a World by David Kossoff