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A new show by Auerbach is always significant: He is the last of a generation of British figurative painters that included Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Leon Kossoff.

The music of the English rock band Free seemed to follow him around; when King looked up the band’s lead guitarist, Paul Kossoff, he discovered that he’d died — of a pulmonary embolism, after years of drug use — when he was 25.

The great thing about Kossoff’s paintings is the ultimate accuracy of their portrayals, in the psychic and physical sense.

It is telling that the only still life in the entire catalogue raisonné is from the early 1950s, when Kossoff was just getting started.

Kossoff’s greatness lies in the extreme way he pits the two basic realities of painting — the actual paint surface and the image depicted — against each another.