Maraichers de Burano
Leonid
Leonid, 1949, OIL ON CANVAS.
Born into the Russian upper class at the turn of the century and dispossessed by the revolution of 1918, Leonid was unlike many of the artists he found himself rubbing shoulders with in 1920s Paris. Not just for the circumstances of his birth, which brought with it wealth and safety in a time when most artists were hailing from more humble beginnings, but in the values to politics and art that this upbringing had fostered. Leonid was part of a group known as the Neo-Romantics whose work was sharply in opposition first to the Impressionists and Cubists in Paris’ gilded age, and then to the abstract expressionist, modern American art movement of the 1950s that Leonid encountered when he moved to New York. His paintings, he believed, did not need to justify themselves with concept or theory, instead the work was inherently valuable for its beauty and the lineage of history it existed in. This work, of gondola drivers in Venice, is in all ways reminiscent of the 18th and 19th century landscapes of the city by countless romantic artists, and of the northern Italian Renaissance masters who found themselves indulging in the same subjects. Leonid, then, was not pushing boundaries or disrupting order, but he was rebelling. His paintings are overtly, almost objectively beautiful, and in a time when conceptions of beauty were fast changing, it was a rather radical act to pay homage to tradition.