With the estate of Leo Leonhard, which is now being made accessible to the public by his son – the London master violin maker and art expert Florian Leonhard – the work of an almost forgotten man is coming to light. An accomplished work that will delight collectors and art lovers alike: a fantastic oeuvre of drawings, prints and, in part, very large-format paintings that had been waiting for years in a studio in Bickenbach near Darmstadt in a kind of slumber for its rediscovery.
Born in Leipzig in 1939, Leo Leonhard is one of those rare artists whose work is equally significant in the field of graphic art and painting. Having grown up in East Germany, the family fled to West Germany in 1952. It is not insignificant for his work that he first studied German language and literature in Marburg. He then studied at the Academy of Art in Düsseldorf from 1961 to 1964. It was here that the graphic artist and sculptor Otto Coester became his teacher, who was in close contact with Alfred Kubin before the Second World War, had himself studied under Gerhard Marcks and took part in documenta II in 1959. Through Coester, Leo Leonhard is thus connected with the tradition of the pre-war avant-garde, especially with surrealist-fantastic tendencies in art.
His work began with the informal abstractions of the late 1950s and 1960s. Leo Leonhard had his first solo exhibition in 1966 at Christa Moering’s gallery in Wiesbaden, which opened in 1956. Artists such as Ludwig Meidner and Ernst Wilhelm Nay, among others, frequented the hotel. The phase of abstraction ended in 1961 with homages to Thomas Gainsborough and Diego Velázquez. In 1962 Leonhard, only just over 20 years old, shows himself in a self-portrait “Self as an old master”.
Leonhard then returned to abstract painting, influenced by painters as diverse as Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Paul Klee and Francis Bacon, before finding a new, surrealist-fantastic expression in 1970 with works such as “Der Plattenhof” and “Hamms Vision” or, in 1971, “Der Gotteslachs”. Leo Leonhard’s oil paintings were once again increasingly created after he had finished teaching, initially more as a transfer of graphic ideas, later more self-confidently, realised “out of the conditions of painting”, as Leonhard himself remarked. Leonhard has reflected intensively on how to deal with the models of art history. The aim was a “dialogue with revered old masters”, but also interpretation or criticism, often underpinned by diary entries, which put conceptual ideas in writing, but which should not, as Leonhard says, restrict any “scope for interpretation”.
Leo Leonhard is an artist who, with his very own signature style and unusual pictorial ideas, has succeeded in inscribing himself in the long history of art – with respect for the past and a critical eye on current political and social developments. From the informal abstractions of the late 1950s and 1960s to surrealist tendencies, to a fantastic surrealism in the 1970s, to the great postmodern homages and political works in the 1980s, the grotesque distortions or even the family pictures, this development is not entirely linear, often in waves, which nevertheless connects art history with our time, the cultural tradition with the explosive present. Because the themes of art are – through the ages – always universal.
Leo Leonhard at the Kulturbahnhof Eller in Düsseldorf
10 March to 21 April
Kultur Bahnhof Eller
Vennhauser Allee 89
Düsseldorf
Tue to Sun 2 to 6 pm
Admission 3 Euro
www.kultur-bahnhof-eller.de
www.leo-leonhard.de
www.rubrecht-contemporary.com
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