Lennart Anderson was born in Detroit in 1928, and he grew up around cars and factories but all he wanted to do was paint. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and Cranbrook, then moved to New York in 1953 where he lived right next to de Kooning on 10th Street. He was a figurative painter when everyone else was going abstract, and he never wavered. He taught at Pratt, Yale, Brooklyn College, and the Art Students League, influencing generations of artists who came after him.
He was a formalist in the best sense, a realist and a classicist all at once. His early work included large street scenes with multiple figures, like “Street Scene” from the early sixties which shows a childs sidewalk accident with adults rushing in and a girl screaming. He loved Piero della Francesca, Degas, and Velázquez, and he studied them like a scholar. But he wasnt copying. He was translating them into a modern American language.
Q: What made Andersons still lifes so special?
A: He could take the humblest objects, a Jiffy Pop pan, a salami, a bunch of radishes, and turn them into something monumental. He called working from nature “humble pie” and his grand compositions “pie in the sky”. The beauty was in the calculation, the relationships between shapes and colors. He once said he liked anything that was put down with paint, even the stupidest calendar art.
He once said, “My drawings are only good when I draw from life”. That quote tells you everything about his method. He wasnt interested in imagination or invention. He wanted to look at something real and figure out how to put it down on canvas. He spent two years at the American Academy in Rome in the late fifties, and that trip warmed up his palette considerably. The Italian light got into his bones and stayed there.
In his later years, macular degeneration made it hard for him to see, but he kept painting anyway. His works got smaller, more intimate, but no less powerful. Hilton Kramer once called him a Degas for our time. He died in 2015 at 87, but his paintings are in the Whitney, the Brooklyn Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Morgan Library. He never became a household name, but among painters, he was a legend.
Q: Did Anderson ever get a major retrospective?
A: He had a big show at the Delaware Art Museum in 1992, his first major museum exhibition. But Kramer was right, in a saner art world museums would have been fighting over him. A traveling retrospective finally happened after his death, making stops at the Southern Utah Museum of Art and other venues. Better late than never, I guess. His work is quiet, unfashionable, and absolutely unforgettable once you really look at it.
