Harold Lehman, 92; Influential Muralist; Post-Surrealist
Hyfler/Rosner
Mary Rourke
April 12, 2006 Wednesday
Harold Lehman, 92; Influential Muralist, Active Artist in
the Post-Surrealist Movemen
A lot of his amazing work here:
Harold Lehman, an artist who worked with Mexican muralist
David Alfaro Siqueiros in Los Angeles in the early 1930s and
became a member of the Post-Surrealist art movement in
Southern California, died April 2. He was 92.
He died of natural causes in his home in Leonia, N.J.,
according to Roger van Oosten, a friend.
Lehman's art career began when he was a student at Manual
Arts High School in Los Angeles in the late 1920s. His
classmates included Philip Guston and Jackson Pollock, who
became leading names in the field.
As a student at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles in the
early 1930s, he developed a style for realistic art, working
in sculpture as well as painting. He met Siqueiros in 1932,
when he attended a lecture by the controversial muralist who
put his pro-labor ideas into his artwork. Lehman took
classes from Siqueiros in exchange for working as his
assistant on several murals. One of them, "Street Meeting"
of 1932, was recently discovered under several layers of
paint at what was then the Chouinard School of Art in Los
Angeles.
Lehman planned to take part in an exhibit organized by
Siqueiros in Hollywood, and to include his small mural,
"Analogy: Capitol/Labor," that shows a man with his hands
tied above his head as if he were going to be flogged.
Van Oosten, who had lengthy conversations with Lehman over
the years, said the artist told him that police -- opposed
to the political nature of the artwork -- raided the
exhibition just before it was due to open in December 1932,
and destroyed the works. One photograph of Lehman's mural
remains
"That is where Harold learned that officialdom can be
oppressive," Van Oosten said this week. Lehman continued to
portray labor-class people in his art.
One early painting, "The Landlady," shows a plain but
elegant woman who wears a hardened expression on her face
that suggests a difficult life. The painting won second
place at the Los Angeles Museum's annual competition of
painters and sculptors in 1933.
The next year, Lehman joined a group of Los Angeles
Post-Surrealist artists led by Lorser Feitelson and Helen
Lundeberg. Several of Lehman's works from that period were
included in a 1995 exhibition, "Pacific Dreams: Currents of
Surrealism and Fantasy in California Art, 1934-1957," at the
Hammer Museum in Westwood Village.
In his review of the 1995 exhibition, Los Angeles Times art
critic Christopher Knight wrote that the artists in the show
displayed a "method for undermining conformist ways of
thinking and feeling" that is at the heart of Surrealism.
Lehman was born in New York City. His parents divorced when
he was in grammar school, and his father moved to Los
Angeles.
At 16, Lehman moved to California and joined him.
In the mid-1930s, he returned to New York, where he painted
several murals sponsored by the Works Projects
Administration.
One of them, "Man's Daily Bread," was commissioned for the
mess hall at what was then Rikers Island Penitentiary.
"It seemed to me that a theme that had some connection with
not only the handling of food but the idea of earning one's
bread by one's own sweat, so to speak, would have some good
constructive connection with that prison without being an
obvious lecture," Lehman said.
He later painted murals for a post office in Renovo, Pa.,
and for the 1939 World's Fair in New York.
Lehman also taught art for many years in his New York City
studio.
His friendships with Siqueiros, Pollock and Guston made
Lehman a valuable resource for art curators, historians and
biographers.
Lehman is survived by his wife, Leona Koutras; two children;
and two grandchildren.
GRAPHIC: PHOTO: Lehman at the age of 16 with sculptures he
created at Manual Arts, where his classmates included
artists Philip Guston and Jackson Pollock. Lehman's 1930s
works showed the harsh life of the working class. PHOTO:
HAROLD LEHMAN A graduate of Manual Arts High and student of
David Alfaro Siqueiros, Lehman returned to New York, his
birthplace, from Los Angeles in the 1930s and taught for
years at his studio.