On New Year’s Day 1941 he summarised his art in his Box in a Valise the portable museum – a

On New Year’s Day 1941, he summarised his art in his Box in a Valise, the portable museum – a limited-edition box containing miniaturised versions of the major works he had created over the past 30 years. Duchamp, the founding father of Dadaism, the absurd Surrealist par excellence, did more than any other single artist to irrevocably transform 20th- century notions of art and aesthetics. The most astonishing thing is that he managed to do it with such brevity of means. His works may have been few, but such is their individual monumental perfection that each one has the capacity to haunt our subconscious. Ask yourself how he achieved this immortality and you stumble upon the ultimate triumph of Duchamp’s intellect – the fact that he knew that some 30 years after his death we would in fact be asking the question itself Obligingly, Duchamp left us the answer. Iain Sinclair’s lecture ‘The Lambeth Alchemists: Elias Ashmole, Jeffrey Archer and the Golden Griffin’ is at the Tate Gallery tomorrow, 6.30pm.

Marcel Duchamp, we all know, is the godfather of New British Conceptualism. “Art,” wrote Duchamp, “is produced by a number of individuals expressing themselves; it is not a question of progress.” This contentious dictum was, in effect, a post-facto statement of intent to undermine the conventional path of art history and the way we look at all art. The man who, more than anyone else, through his intensely worked panels, celebrates that which will vanish and fade. Strange territory with its own microclimate, where time is still in suspension.It’s our business if we want to read more into these works. Kossoff denies that the bare, seven-branched tree that rears above Embankment Station makes any allusion to the Menorah, or ritual candelabrum. The marks on the soft pillars of Christ Church, Spitalfields are not, so Kossoff briskly informed me, cabbalistic, but “a man with a trombone”.Kossoff should be seen as the laureate of the North London line, the poet of embankments and cuttings. The oils, seen together, are like great windows of “slow glass” that cause light to flow more hesitantly towards the eye of the viewer Time as loaded as the layerings of paint Trains have slithered to a halt Pedestrians are stamped down like holocaust shadows.

The raw red of a school building seen from the car becomes the brickwork of the tenements around Arnold Circus in Shoreditch, where Kossoff lived as a child. But it is also a site of ritual, both purifying and Dionysian Human and trapped in a timeless frieze. Kossoff’s swimming pool in Willesden, its seething, gesturing bodies against a blue that surpasses the chemistry of the real, is no faux-naif gesture It is where he taught his children to swim It is Willesden on an autumn afternoon in 1971. It doesn’t matter that the imagery, to the swift uncaring glance, is alarmingly close to pavement art, or the stuff that used to be rounded up for open exhibitions in the Whitechapel Gallery. These are no longer Kossoff’s own memory shards, he has abdicated all that froth of sentiment, but massive retrievals of place and climate, bulwark architecture around which the clouds break.

The results, according to your standpoint, are heroic or faintly absurd. Lined up for inspection along the gallery walls, the topography of remembrance effects an extraordinary procession: the personal subsumed into the spirit and consciousness of the city. There is, perhaps, something disingenuous here, the effect known and exploited in the long trance of composition. The magician turning aside impertinent enquiry, aligning himself, as visionary artisan, with the lost traditions of East London craftsmanship – the bakers, tailors, builders, draymen and slaughtermen.The process whereby aspects of the city are reconstructed in the studio, sketches transmuted into large oils, offers itself, against a climate of instant effects and production-line technology, as both documentary and elegiac. Questioned more closely about details, small gestures or marks in the painting, Kossoff will always demur, find a practical solution.