Description

This work demonstrates Leonard Lehrer’s primacy as a print-maker. Marrying together bold lines with subtle shading, he creates a remarkable three-dimensionality. This beautiful picture of an Italianate garden simultaneously has the character of a line drawing with the aliveness of the hyperrealists. This technique, which you can see in all of his Formal Gardens works, is difficult to achieve successfully in the challenging arena of lithography.

Perhaps more important to Lehrer’s legacy is his interweaving of classical balance and extreme order, on the one hand, with a romantic vision on the other. He was deeply interested in structure and balance and harmony, with the result of great but restrained beauty.

This work was done while Lehrer was the Director of the School of Art at Arizona State University, and where he worked with the legendary print-maker Jules Heller.

This work is part of Lehrer’s Formal Garden series, which also includes “Formal Gardens” (1975), “Pushkin Gardens” (1973), “View of St. Petersburg (1978), “Sabika” (1972), “Royal Garden (Herrenhausen)” (1977), and “La Granja de San Ildefonso” (1978).

Lehrer is among the country’s leading print-makers, with works at The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, The National Gallery of Art, and The Bibliotheque Nationale de France.