By James Lechay
Located in Lambertville, NJ
Jim’s of Lambertville is proud to offer this artwork by:
James Lechay (1907 – 2001)
Born in the Bronx in 1907, James Lechay spent most of his childhood in Brooklyn before moving to Joilet, Illinois at age 13 to live with his uncle after his mother passed away. In 1928, he received his B.A. in psychology from the University of Illinois. The next year, he attended one week of graduate school before leaving to study under his brother, the painter Myron Lechay, in New York. At his brother’s studio, James began to associate with other artists of the time such as Milton Avery, Mark Rothko, Arshile Gorky, William Zorach, and Raphael and Moses Soyer. From Myron, James Lechay learned to train his eye to observe natural forms and developed a philosophy dependent upon the relationship built between the artist and the subject.
Lechay became engaged in the social and political issues of Depression-era New York and even joined the social realism movement for a brief time in the 1930s. He operated as the leader of the Artists Union while employed by the Works Progress Administration (WPA). With the WPA, Lechay traveled to Las Vegas, New Mexico, where he established a gallery and exhibited the works of Milton Avery, Max Weber, and other WPA artists. Despite his association with many artists and artistic communities in New York in the 1930s and 40s, Lechay opposed adopting a style due to its popularity and commercial success. His use, however, of large brushstrokes from Abstract Expressionism, the flattened plane of Modernism, and the simple compositions of early Abstraction created a combination of styles completely his own.
A painter of a vast range of subjects, including still lifes, portraits, and landscapes, Lechay was known to reduce these forms to their visual essentials. Lechay often did not date his paintings as he frequently reworked them, even after they were exhibited, calling his pieces, “finished at all stages and never finished”.
In 1945, Lechay was hired by the University of Iowa’s art department, where he worked alongside Mauricio Lasansky, Humbert Albrizio, Carl Fracassini, and Byron Burford...
Category
1990s Abstract Mario Gonzalez Rodriguez Art
