Leonard Edmondson On Sale

Leonard Edmondson began his career at the University of California at Berkeley, where he earned a Master of Arts degree. After service in the U.S. Army Military Intelligence, during World War II, Edmondson embarked on a distinguished teaching career that spanned five decades and culminated in his position as Chair of the art department at California State University Los Angeles. A renowned printmaker whose work was informed by the experimental printmaking techniques of Stanley William Hayter, Edmondson also worked in a range of other media including oil paint, watercolor and collage. By 1950, Edmondson’s work had evolved from figurative representation into abstraction, in what he cited as a journey of inspiration, discovery and meaning. His distinctive style is inspired by the abstract surrealism of Paul Klee (which he had viewed in Europe during World War II) and the intuitive expressionism espoused by Hans Hofmann. Edmondson's vernacular invokes in his own words ‘almost remembered' forms, feelings and spaces, “This vocabulary manifests itself in a dynamic structure where color responds to the size and position of shapes and reinforces the intent of the composition. My painting is not art of rebellion but one of discovery and sharing.”

Inspired by the nontraditional ways Postimpressionists like Paul Cézanne and Georges Seurat depicted the world, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque pioneered an even more abstract style in which reality was fragmented into flat, geometric forms. Cubism majorly influenced 20th-century Western art as it radically broke with the adherence to composition and linear perspectives that dated back to the Renaissance. Its watershed moments are considered Picasso’s 1907 Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, in which nude figures are fractured into angular shapes, and Georges Braque’s 1908 painting show, which prompted a critic to describe his visual reductions as “cubes.”

Although Cubism was a revolutionary art movement for European culture, it was informed by African masks and other tribal art. Its artists, which included Fernand Léger, Alexander Archipenko, Marcel Duchamp, Juan Gris and Jean Metzinger, experimented with compressing space and playing with the tension between solid and void forms in their work. While their subjects were often conventional, such as still lifes, nudes and landscapes, they were distorted without any illusion of realism.

Cubist art evolved through different distinct phases. In Analytic Cubism, from 1908 to 1912, figures or objects were “analyzed” into pieces that were reassembled in paintings and sculptures, as if presenting the same subject matter from many perspectives at once. The palette was usually monochromatic and muted, giving attention to the overlapping planes. Synthetic Cubism, dating from 1912 to 1914, moved to brighter colors and a further flattening of images. This unmooring from formal ideas of art would shape numerous styles that followed, from Dada to Surrealism.

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