Federico Lebrun

Background

Federico Lebrun was born in Naples, Italy, the son of Edoardo Lebrun, a railroad official, and of Assunta Carione.

Education

He graduated from the National Technical School of Naples in 1914. He spent the next three years at the city's National Technical Institute preparing for a career in finance. Later he attended night classes at the Naples Academy of Fine Arts, where he remained as a student until 1922. Among his instructors and peers impressionism was very much a prevailing vogue. But Lebrun found the Italian adaptations of this style "ill-suited" for expressing the "carnal" texture of his Neapolitan surroundings. In seeking a foundation for his art, he reached back to the baroque traditions of the seventeenth century, which he felt best captured the human passions and teeming movement of his native city. Years later, after his style had undergone many drastic changes, he claimed that in his abiding concern for portraying the vitality of the human spirit, he had remained faithful to the essence of baroque outlook.

Career

During World War I Lebrun served in the Italian army, then, with two years remaining in his term of military service, he transferred to the navy. In 1922, Lebrun became a designer for a manufacturer of stained glass. Two years later his firm sent him to America to manage its factory in Springfield, Illinois. When his contract with the Italian concern expired in 1925, Lebrun moved to New York City to work in commercial art.

Within a few years Lebrun had become one of the most highly paid magazine illustrators of the day, his work appearing in many publications including Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, and the New Yorker. But in the early 1930's, increasingly disturbed with the transitory nature of periodical art, he decided to give up this lucrative endeavor in favor of purely "creative" art. In 1933, after an extended period of study in Italy, Lebrun established his own studio in New York City. Two years later, on the strength of his proposal for a mural on the history of mining, he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship. Although the grant was renewed the next year, the mural never went beyond the preliminary stages. Simultaneously Lebrun was working on a commission from the Works Progress Administration for a mural in the New York City Post Office annex. But two years of disagreements with his supervisors resulted in abandonment of the undertaking.

In 1938, Lebrun moved to Santa Barbara, California, where he joined the faculty of Chouinard Art Institute. He became a United States citizen in 1939. These changes in circumstance marked the beginning of his most productive years. Lebrun's professional evolution defies convenient classification. Embracing both traditional and modern concepts of art, and in the end equally at ease with both, he drew inspiration from quarters as diverse as the Italian baroque masters, Paul Cezanne, and Pablo Picasso. From the powerful realism that characterized the drawings of his first one-man exhibitions of the early 1940's, his art had by the decade's end become a mixture of abstraction and expressionism. Nevertheless, Lebrun never entirely forsook realistic forms, and in his later years he periodically worked out inventive "revisions" of the works of Goya.

In 1947 Lebrun began his "Crucifixion cycle. " For some three years he devoted himself almost entirely to variant portrayals of Christ's martyrdom. The exhibition of this phase of his work in 1950, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the de Young Museum in San Francisco, won him an international reputation.

In 1951 he was appointed director of the Jepson Art Institute in Los Angeles, where he had been teaching since 1947. In the early 1950's he also taught at the Instituto Allende in Mexico. There a new vividness of light and color entered his work, and he began to experiment in collage. On his return to California, Lebrun embarked on a series of drawings and paintings depicting the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps. His thematic concern was not so much man's cruelty to man as the indomitability of the human spirit.

Among the greatest achievements of Lebrun's final period was his mural portrayal of Genesis for Pomona College in California. With this work, one critic claimed, the artist had come closer than ever before to achieving an "essential synthesis of intent and accomplishment. " The success of this venture proved something of a catalyst; and in Lebrun's subsequent work, mainly graphic interpretations of literary images from Dante, Herman Melville, and Bertolt Brecht, the unity of purpose and expression reached still greater heights.

Throughout his career Lebrun remained indefatigably adventurous. In the two years before his death, he began experimenting in sculpture. Immediately at home in this medium, he worked with amazing rapidity. Lebrun died in Malibu, California.

Achievements

• Lebrun was a main figure in the early Los Angeles modern art history. Many of his works addressed issues that dealt with the human condition. He was best known for his series of paintings on "The Crucifixion. " The thirty-odd figures in wax and bronze left at his death were considered to be among his most impressive work.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Drawings for Dante's Inferno by Rico Lebrun

    (Black Cloth. 4 original lithographs, signed in the plate,...)

  • Rico Lebrun: Transformations/transfiguration : "--changing what is disfigured into what is transfigured." : 13 November 1983- 18 January 1984

    (art book)

  • Rico Lebrun Drawings
  • Rico Lebrun: Paintings & Drawings, 1946-1961, with Notes by the Artist (In Commemoration of the Centenary of Italian Unification)
  • Rico Lebrun: An Exhibition Organized by the Fine Arts Patrons of Newport Harbor in collaboration with the Newport Harbor Service League
  • The American Academy in Rome Annual Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture - 1960
  • Rico Lebrun, Drawings. Foreword by James Thrall Soby
  • Drawings for Dante's Inferno,

Connections

His first wife, Portia Novello, was a commercial artist. They had no children. They divorced in 1937. In 1940 he married Elaine Leonard Corbino. They had no children. She died in 1946. On July 19, 1948, Lebrun married Constance Johnson Hovey, and shortly thereafter adopted her son by a previous marriage.

Father:

Edoardo Lebrun

railroad official

Mother:

Assunta Carione

Spouse:

Constance Johnson Hovey

Spouse:

Portia Novello

artist

Spouse:

Elaine Leonard Corbino

References

• Rico Lebrun (1900-1964)
• In the Meridian of the Heart: Selected Letters of Rico Lebrun
• Rico Lebrun (1900-1964)
• Rico Lebrun: The Line of Passion - Drawings, Paintings, Prints and Sculpture