Leon Kroll (1884-1974)
Leon Kroll first established his reputation between 1911 and 1915 as a painter of powerful views of the bridges, wharves and riverfronts of New York City. Although Kroll loved to tell of his inadvertent discovery of Cezanne’s and Van Gogh’s paintings when he was an art student in Paris, Kroll’s early New York scenes are in fact a great deal closer in their painterly style and progressive spirit to the “Ashcan School” paintings by his friends John Sloan and George Bellows than they are to the works of the French Post-Impressionists.
Kroll’s love affair with European modernists becomes far more apparent after his marriage to the Frenchwoman Genevieve Domec in 1923, a marriage that was followed by two long stays in France, from 1925 to 1927 and from 1927 to 1929. These two sojournes were broken by his return to New York City in 1927 for his one-man exhibition at the Frank Rehn Galleries. By the late 1920′s Kroll’s style had matured greatly, in part because of lasting friendships with the French painters Robert Dulaunay and Andre Dunoyer de Segonzac.
p4A.com acknowledges the assistance of Shannon’s Fine Art Auctioneers and Bruce Chambers Ph.D. in the preparation of this note.