Rico Lebrun, christened Frederico, was born on December
10, 1900, in Naples, Italy. He was the youngest of three children.
Lebrun served in the Italian army during
the last year of World War I (1917-1918) after which he spent two years
in the Italian navy and studied at the Industrial Institute and the Naples Academy
of Fine Arts. He worked with fresco painters Cambi and Albino in Naples.
As a designer for a stained glass factory
in Naples, Lebrun was sent to the factory's new branch in Springfield, Illinois, in 1924
as foreman and instructor in stained-glass technique.
By 1925, Lebrun moved to New York where
he became a highly successful commerical artist for such publications as Vogue, Harper's
Bazaar, and the New Yorker. During this time, he married and together with his wife made
several trips to Italy, where he studied fresco painting with Galimberti in Rome, and
researched the Signorelli frescoes in Orvieto, Italy.
Returning to New York in 1933, Lebrun
worked with Louis Rubenstein on a mural at Harvard University's Fogg Museum (the
mural was later walled over). He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1935/36 for a
proposed mural project "Story of the Mines" (which was never executed) and
worked on a WPA mural "River Flood" at the Pennsylvania Station Post Office
Annex in New York.
Two California artists Gridley Barrows (who
later became an architect) and Santa Barbara painter Channing Peake assisted Lebrun on the
WPA project and were instrumental in persuading Lebrun to leave New York and go west to
California, which he did after conflict with the WPA caused the abandonment of the
mural and the breakup of his marriage.
Moving to Santa Barbara, CA, in
1938, Lebrun accepted a teaching job at Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, met
and married Elaine Leonard in 1940, and taught animation at Walt Disney Studios. Donald
Bear, director of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art organized the first exhibition of
Lebrun's work at the Faulkner Memorial Art Gallery in Santa Barbara.
During the 1940's Lebrun's work was
shown in New York at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art,
the Metropolitan Museum of Art (which purchased his painting "The Bull
Ring") and the Julian Levy Gallery gave Lebrun his first one man show. During
this period of escalating artistic recognition, Lebrun suffered a personal loss as
his wife Elaine died. Continuing to live and work in Southern California, Lebrun was
appointed artist-in-residence at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and became an
instructor, and later director, at the newly formed Jepson Art Institute in Los
Angeles.
In 1948, he married Constance Johnson, daughter
of Pasadena architect Reginald Johnson and later adopted her son, David. During the
ensuing years, he produced his most powerful work -- much of it based on his preoccupation
with man's inhumanity to man -- including the Crucifixion series, the Buchenwald
series, and the Genesis mural at Pomona College in Claremont, CA. His work
was exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the De Young Museum in San
Francisco, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The Crucifixion Triptych is
in the permanent collection of Syracuse University in New York.
In the years before his death of cancer in 1963, Rico Lebrun
received many honors and awards for his work, such as the Temple Gold Medal from
the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Award of Merit from the American Academy in
Arts and Letters and was elected a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
Lebrun enjoyed communication not only as
an artist, but as a teacher and as a friend. He found time to teach at the Instituto
Allende in Mexico (1953), as Visitng Professor at Yale University (1958), and as
artist-in-residence at the American Academy in Rome (1959). His letters to other artists
and friends have been gathered together in a recently published book , The Meridian of
the Heart, from which the following manuscript fragment is taken:
"When I get Home it
will be noon, and the sand, puma color, will have motionless flocks of ruffled gulls
thinking very quietly about being gulls. The rocks will be pulling up their short
shadows so the tide can wash around them. No one will ever mock this time, nor demand
anything from me. Not even I, my dumb friend. From the depths of my being I
mean to be without master. And without hours. And without skill. And without
me.
You, who made the sand I walk on, help me see how it is that it
does not try to change the footprints of the gulls any more than it does mine; that it can
bear the evidence of both without love or hate..."
Rico Lebrun, 1960
In the Meridian of the Heart
Selected Letters of Rico Lebrun
Edited by James Renner and David Lebrun
Publisher: David R. Godine, Boston, MA
Available in hardcover; 52 duotone illustrations. |
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