Education
Kleinman studied at the American Artists School: murals with Anton Refregier, painting with Jean Liberte, and sculpture with Milton Hebald.
Kleinman studied at the American Artists School: murals with Anton Refregier, painting with Jean Liberte, and sculpture with Milton Hebald.
The medium of most of the works Kleinman created is oil on canvas, but she also produced some mixed-media work and watercolors. She exhibited in museums in New York and Massachusetts and in galleries throughout the country. She also took classes through the World Pet Association, City College of New York, and the National Academy of Design.
Kleinman continued to paint into her nineties.
Another painting of Randy and paintings of Brian Napoleon were included in a 2006 show at the Ann Arbor District Library, Ordinary People, in which Kleinman showed the extraordinary qualities of "ordinary" individuals. In addition to portraits, she created abstractions, still lifes, and landscapes.
They were first exhibited in 1971 at the Becket Arts Center, Massachusetts. They were compared to the works of Paul Klee, include fanciful figures and places.
After a career that included sales through galleries in New York and various New England cities, Kleinman sold many paintings in her senior years.
In 2007 the University of Michigan purchased a mixed media self-portrait of a woman reading a newspaper. lieutenant is permanently displayed in the University"s new East Ann Arbor Health Center. After her death, in August 2012, some of her paintings were displayed at Gallery 55+ in Ann Arbor and she was given a retrospective by the University of Michigan School of Art & Design.
More than 300 paintings were displayed in the latter, which chronicled Kleinman"s career from the early 1930s through 2010, when she did her last full painting.
Local news site singled out her painting, The World Around Maine, as the key work, saying it was painted with "a directness that’s a testimony to the aesthetic and social integrity that modernism sought to reflect."
Kleinman survived two husbands, Jack Skurnick, who died in 1952 and was the father of Davida, also known as Davi Napoleon. Skurnick was a record producer and violinist.
He co-founded the Becket Arts Center with her. She was born in the Bronx, New York, where she lived until 1958, when she moved to Brooklyn Heights, also in New York City.