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About Leon Kroll
BORN: New York City, 6 December 1884
DIED: Gloucester, Massachusetts 5 October 1974
At the Art Students League Kroll studied under John H. Twachtman, drawing from the Antique and sketching outdoors, then he enrolled at the National Academy of Design. As part-time assistant librarian and with some money from his mother, Kroll financed his education and soon emerged as the top winner of student prizes at the Academy. By the time he was eighteen, Kroll was exhibiting as a professional artist at the NAD and had attracted notice among such instructors as Kenyon Cox, J. Alden Weir, and John W. Alexander. Buoyed up by prizes and the Edward A. Mooney Scholarship for study in Europe for two years, beginning in 1908, Kroll went to Paris and enrolled in the Académie Julian, where he soon won the first prize for a painted nude in a student competition. Despite training under Jean-Paul Laurens, Kroll soon fell under the spell of impressionism and painted pictures in high-keyed and broken color: in 1909-10, Kroll painted en plein air at Vernon and even caught the attention of Claude Monet (Leon Kroll, A Spoken Memoir, 1983, pp. 16-24).
Kroll also discovered "the subtle quality of the planes of color in Cézanne's work" in an art gallery on the rue Lafitte in 1909. A similar encounter with Van Gogh's style set Kroll off on a diverse aesthetic exploration of nature. Upon his return to the States in 1910, Kroll exhibited his work at the National Academy and received favorable reviews from critics like James Huneker and Frank Jewett Mather in major East Coast newspapers. Only a year later he was teaching at the NAD. Kroll's career really took off in 1913 at the Armory Show, when Arthur Jerome Eddy bought his Terminal Yards, a picture of New York painted from Weehawken Heights. Kroll sent four works to the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. He met Sonia and Robert Delaunay and began to show an interest in post-impressionist developments. In his paintings of nudes, Cézanne's influence carried over from his landscapes in the fullness of forms and a carefully studied balance of masses. Reminiscing about these stylistic shifts, Kroll noted: "for the period around 1915-18, I thought Cézanne was a very interesting influence on my work." However, Kroll is now considered to be a leading classical (not modernist) American painter of the female nude, who thoroughly comprehended the elegant aesthetic qualities and expressive power of disegno. Back in France in 1923, Kroll painted along the seashore at Honfleur, associated with the Fauvist circle of the Delaunays, and met and married Geneviève (Viette) Domec, a French woman form the higher echelons of government fonctionnaires |
Paintings by Leon Kroll
| Circus Rider |
| oil on canvas: 16 x 20 inches |
| signed: lower right |
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