Katalog LL3

In Leonard Lehrer and his Infl uences, there is a formulation of the “perfect instant” where past is redeemed in the present. This philosophy echoes the voice of a historian. Reminiscent of Walter Benjamin- a philosopher of history, consistently vigilant to those victims in the past, Leonard has lived with histories, redeeming personal, kin and humankind. Leonard reworks happenings of the past into a reality of present hope. Time, was now.

Introduction

Throughout Leonard Lehrer`s repertoire is the continual presence of memory. This is accentuated through a choice of materials, technique and form. The content determines the means. In Lehrer`s early work he spent time experimenting with great sensitivity to tone, colour, and compositional balance reminiscent of the still life painter Giorgio Morandi who focused on depicting the familiar but with subtle gradations of hue, tone and colour, thus making the depictions of familiar have a mysterious quality. Lithography, a favoured method in Lehrer`s work relies upon the strongest ink that survives for the image. This prefi gures endurance, evident in content throughout his work. The layering techniques are in the presence of now. This form of collage and mixed media, blasts open that continum of history. It is only through using that present form, that the past begins to seep through the cracks of time…time collapses and infl uences from the Alhambra, the quasi-mathmatical composition of the Gardens of Last Year at Marienbad; Judaism; Jorges Luis Borges; Pontoromo and his daughter Anna-Katrina, all fl ower and bloom out to the reader. This technique allows a multitude of perspectives, Lehrer`s personal history, the extrinsic history to his own and within this, the reader can experience and savor their own vast array of infl uences.

Sojourns and Embarkation to Cythera

The fascination with formal gardens depicted in Sojourns and Embarkation to Cythera are mysteriously still and removed from the ordinary world. There is a feeling of the Romantic lonely wanderer, like the Wandering Jew, an exiled bearer of testimony and witness. Lehrer in his art is narrating a tale revolving around the wanderings of a changeless character in a changing world. Lehrer`s formal gardens depicted in Sojourns and Embarkation to Cythera allude to Nicholas Poussin’s 17th century mechanisms in the painterly pursuit of three-dimensional composition in space. Furthermore, Lehrer found affi nity with the formal garden leitmotif embedded within Alain Renais`s Last year at Marienbad. Here characters wander seemingly lost and in a dream. It is precisely this combination of symmetry in the external world and labyrinth in the internal consciousness, that is evident in Lehrer`s works.

“…the viewer is presented with images from the preceding year that may have been prior, but might also be visions of time future or the present. One image is tumbled upon the other and the viewer is lost in a vertigo of timelessness” (Gergen, K.J: 1991)

This reactivation of memory from a present moment relates to Jorge Luis Borges’ mediation on time in Library of Babel where all that is required for time to be infi nite, is for time - thus memory to be infi nitely sub-divisible. Borges’ work evidently infl uenced Lehrer`s as the memories depicted in Sojourns and Embarkation to Cythera are infi nite not only for himself but also for the viewer.

In Embarkation to Cythera there is the combination of Flemish Baroque from Ruben’s, The Three Graces, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, searching for his purist form stylised as Neo-classicism and Florentine Mannerism from Jacopo Pontormo. It is these very combinations of style, layered upon each other that in turn allow the viewer to see into history of art as being non-hierarchic and each infl uencing one another through their presence in time, in history. Lehrer, integral to this canon self-refl exivity, style and form reveal power structures that have repressed the continual presence of history as being fl uid and non-linear. Furthermore, Lehrer`s personal history is accentuated through the representation of his daughter Anna-Katrina. In Embarkation to Cythera her face contorted by disability is equal to the beauty of the elongated mannerist women by Pontormo. In Sojourns, Anna-Katrina’s hands isolated and layered upon one another and aligned with the Alhambra domes and Andalucian, roses metonymically allude to Flamenco - the dance of suffering. It is in this representation that we glimpse sight of Anna Katrina`s will for presence. Just like the hands that are the only human form depicted in the Alhambra due to Muslim order, these hands break the silence of concrete form and order created by human kind in the world.

Dialogues I through IV

The hands are loquacious, the fi ngers are tongues and their silence is clamorous (Aurelius Cassiodorus).The hand acts and acting speaks. This speaking can be as literal as a word, which represents something, or it can be simply like a sound, a pure vocal dynamic. Due to the complexity of the hand’s anatomical structure and of its articulation possibilities, there are in the movement of the fi ngers alone infi nite possible modifi cations of behavior. So it is possible for hands to both speak (transmit concepts) and to exist as pure sound. Furthermore, there is a universal language that is articulated by the hands, that is intercultural and so in this way Anna-Katrina propelled her presence into the world. Lehrer, by isolating these movements of expression, in the form of these potent lithographs, shows they are elegant and seemingly ordered in actual disorder.

The Rose Season and Boabdil`s Sigh

The Rose Season conciliates Lehrer`s ardor for the Moorish arch, the intensity of the Andalucian Rose and the colors of the Alhambra that gave rise to its name “red castle”. Alhambra is from an Arabic root signifying in Arabic, the red (Al Hamra) that alludes to a cacophony of infl uences that co-existed at this time and space in history. In the middle of the 13th Century, Spain offers an example in history when African Muslims (or Moors), large Jewish communities, and Christians lived together harmoniously, and creatively, for several centuries. Arguably the bright red of the rose represents the friendship and positive communication of people from an array of cultures living together in harmony. Whereas the yellow rose connotes dying love and thus dying harmony for union between these people. The poem that gave rise to name: The Rose Season elaborates further a sense of belonging to an epoch of elation.

In Boabdil`s Sigh, the Generalife (the Muslim Jennat al Arid, “Garden of Arid,” or “Garden of the Architect”) dating from the 13th Century are framed by the “mocárabe”. The Generalife gardens are said to depict the original Moorish character. There is repetition of the rose motif plays now, domesticated within glass vases, like clipped hedges and formality of Generalife, and Lehrer`s symetrical garden motif.

Self- portrait with almost everything

The self fi nds articulation in not only in material things but also the metaphors and narratives related to intersubjective social life. Fields of memory and experience are created like a web through materiality. In Lehrer`s self, Fleur-de-lis an icon of purity leads to student experiemtenation in art and life. Giving way to fascination of Persian patterns, this was arguably a period of existentialism for Lehrer. Subsequently, part of The Fall of Icarus Peter Bruegel the Elder, 1558. Here Lehrer expresses visually, by being close with Anna-Katrina how he felt her raw will to live-expressed similarly by the framed electronic heart-beat, but never reached as, she did, the sun.

Birth of Venus & Baracole

There is an innocence about these pieces. The name The Birth of Venus, a painting by Sandro Boticelli 1485-1486 is not strictly classical in form. It is a presentiment of Mannerism-a favored style throughout Lehrer`s work. In Baracole The water layered upon one another is arguably self-refl exive. In that, wisdom of survival, takes water-like pliancy and anonymity. That the waters are from Venitian canals in both Baracole and Venus permits a peek into the history of Venice as an international trading port for art in the 15th Century, where it was a time of great occidental and oriental exchange. This is indeed intristic to Lehrer`s conceptual and artistic maturation.

Anna Katrina Entering Heaven

Anna-Katrina Entering Heaven is a deeply personal depiction of Lehrer`s daughter entering heaven. Based upon The Burial of Count Orgaz, by El Greco, in Lehrer`s print Anna-Katrina`s soul is being assisted in its ascent by an angel. It is the archangel Gabriel from Pontormo`s Annunciation. The emphasis of pathos is powerful for the closing moments of her life. This Giorgione like emotion is both poignant languid. Poignancy for that concentrated anticipation frozen in time depicted through computerized records of her fading heartbeat, languid through that sense of continuity to infi nity on the horizon. Anna-Katrina`s infi nite presence becomes embodied within the angels from Mannerist (Renaissance-Baroque style) of the 15th-16th century that become a leitmotif throughout Lehrer`s work. Through the visual arts Anna-Katrina lives eternal and it is this very medium that fi rst breathed exuberance of life into Lehrer. There is a full circle. There are subtle representations of Judaism within this piece. Part of the Jewish faith believes that life is about embracing suffering and that people will fi nd divine redemption in heaven. His daughter through her transformation into an angel embodies this divine redemption.

Kaddish Kaddish denotes the Jewish rituals of mourning. The liturgy Kaddish is spoken in Aramaic, however, the complete Kaddish ends with a supplication for peace. This is in Hebrew and from the bible. The prayer, the Venetian canals bordering the print on the left and right, the presence of Anna-Katrina at the foot of the print and the remembrance of two hundred and four Jews that were deported from Venice and only eight returned from the death camps metonymically persist with Lehrer`s continual Jetzzeit This presence of now echoes Benjamin’s: “Don`t start with the good old things, but the bad new ones” (Benjamin:1940). It is through this choice of perhaps uncomfortable remembrance that time is redeemed and the messiah arrives. Growing up with the memory of Eastern European Jews being at the hands of a terrible fate in war, and Lehrer’s paternal family being among the fortunate to have been able to emigrate to the United States in the 1920’s, and the concurrent memory of his mother’s two sisters and their families, the only of her large family who survived the death camps, and who lived with the Lehrers as they later adjusted to their new lives and their new country. It was in Philadelphia as a young boy that Lehrer found his supreme choice of triumph over loss in sketching, drawing, painting and printmaking. Perhaps it is this personal past that is latent within his art - the essentiality to blast the past and the present into the future to redeem the victims from the past. The need to adjust, to mend, through attrition.

Lehrer`s work is of a deeply personal nature, but his gest is toward social issues. Gest used by is where all the components of an artistic piece contribute to elicit a social theme. Lehrer`s tableaux`s didactically condenses past, present and future revealing mediations on the structures of the artistic cannon, faith and morality, hope and the virtues of attrition.

Jessica Kennedy White

Kaddish

Archival Ink Jet Print44 inch x 84 inch

The rose Season


Dialogue I-III

All LithographsAll 41 inch x 30.25 inch

Embarkation of Cythera

44 inch x 84 inchArchival Ink Jet Print

Barcarole


The Birth of Venus


Self-portrait with almost everything


Sojourns


I give Thanks for Love


Boabdil’s Sigh


Anna Katrina Entering Heaven


The Artist

Leonard Lehrer is an American artist with an international reputation. His works have been exhibited for several decades in national, international, solo and group exhibitions. He studied at the Philadelphia College of Art and the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1960. He lives and works in Chicago. His repertoire includes oil paintings, watercolors, drawings, prints such as lithographs and ink jet prints, as well as collages. His work signifi es a long evolutional period of ideas and intentions and he has been inspired by the most diverse infl uences such as the paintings of Pontormo, the gardens and the domed ceilings of the Alhambra, the French movie Last Year at Marienbad, and the writings of the Argentine novelist and poet Jorge Luis Borges. Leonard Lehrer’s main theme relates to concepts of time, the infi nite and the simultaneity of past, present and future. The latter was given concrete expression through his art of the short but remarkable life of his daughter Anna-Katrina. Altogether, there have been more than forty solo exhibitions in well-known galleries and museums all over the US, including New York and Philadelphia as well as in Europe, Germany and Spain.

Internationally known museums have acquired examples of his art within their major collections, such as the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., the Sprengel Museum in Hannover, Germany, the Bibliothéque nationale de France, Paris and numerous others. Besides his artistic career Leonard Lehrer holds the position of Dean of The School of Fine and Performing Arts, Columbia College Chicago. Previously he served as Chair, Department of Art and Art Professions, New York University, et al. In addition, he has curated traveling exhibitions, including “Modern American Printmaking,” which was shown throughout Germany and Spain.

Leonard Lehrer’s work is cited in a multiplicity of books and catalogues. He has been active in writing articles for journals such as the Art Journal, The Tamarind Papers, and the Journal of the Print World. Leonard Lehrer has received awards including the “Kunstpreis” of the Heitland Foundation, Celle/Germany, the Gold Medal Award of Distinction of the National Society of Arts and Letters, a USIA grant to la Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia, and a Fulbright Scholar Program Artist-in Residence Grant, followed by another Fulbright Senior Scholar AIA Grant, both to Greece in Printmaking.

This project has been organised by:With the support of:

Collaborating Master Technician & Digital Photography Lab:

Erick Dennis Rowe

Catalogue Concept, Layout & Design:Anna Helene v. Schubert

Webdesign & Adaption:Ines Culinovic

www.iccm.at/leonardlehrerLithographs produced & printed at

Anchor Graphics, Chicago, IL

Steven Kapelke Provost/Academic Vice: PresidentWarrick L. Carter: President

Commentary

I have always believed that an artist’s work is essentially autobiographical. It might be in the approach, in the content or in the spirit. In the work of Leonard Lehrer these are all together. His approach is one of a reverence of history and place. Rather than being about him, the work makes you feel that what you see is his own view, as if you were looking through his eyes.

Leonard’s images and subjects are ones that he knows a great deal about. Having worked with these subjects for many years he has explored a multitude of levels of historical, personal and aesthetic issues associated with them. While the images are always beautiful, they are at times diffi cult. A large part of the responsibility of the artist is to fi nd that beauty – beauty which is visual, and perhaps most importantly, beauty which is not obvious, as this is the difference between art and record. That quality distinguishes the artist from the draughtsman.

Leonard’s work is about relationships. It is about his relationship to his family and their past; it is about his relationship to special places that have spoken to him and which, for deeply personal reasons, he has returned to again and again. He considers and reconsiders these places in as many ways as possible in an ongoing effort to understand and unearth his relationship to them. It is however, above all, Leonard’s spirit that distinguishes him from other artists.

Were I an art historian, I would attempt to provide insight into how and why Leonard’s selection of images is important. For some this might be necessary and others interesting. For me, it is the underlying association that is as important as the images themselves. I see an insistence on beauty, corporeality and the potential all things possess. As noted above it is through Leonard’s eyes that we feel we look. Favored images of Moorish history, or what in a less inspired artist’s work would merely be pictures of fl owers, become personal events. This creates a certain discomfort, as if we are seeing images that are too personal; things are not at all as they seem – as if we are reading someone’s diary and experiencing the mixed feelings that accompany an intrusion on privacy. This is an ordered life. He is a thinking man.

Leonard Lehrer is his art.

Steven RandArtist, Founder apexart New York City, NY

Katalog LL3

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