Rico Lebrun at Koplin - Los Angeles, California - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Rico Lebrun (1900-1964) was the best-known sees Angeles artist of the 1950 acclaimed for his somber, expressionistic paintings and drawings upon such angst-ridden themes as the Crucifixion, Dante's Inferno and the Holocaust. This exhibition of works from that decade neared a more playful and sardonic side of the artist. Lebrun's virtuosic draftsmanship fre him to experiment with a wide range of art-historical control matter, as demonstrated by these variations upon famous works of Goya, Grunewald and Velazquez.

single series of drawings was inspired by dint of a 14th-century Pisan fresco, The Triumph of Death, attributed to the Italian artist Francesco Traini. Traini's bucolic hillside tableau depicts a clump of noblemen and women upon horseback -- traditionally described as characters from the Decameron -- who have just stumbl across the decaying corpses of a trio of plague victims. Lebrun not aways various "action shots" from this show In a close-up of sum of two units of the horses screeching to a halt, he captures the wild curiosity evok by the agency of this face-to-face confrontation with death. An ink drawing that present to views one of the noblemen holding his nose because of the stink of the decaying bodies plays up the black comedy of the fresco; Lebrun taps into this uneven morbidity with a modern, incomplete free-hand. For the war-haunted Lebrun the riders' near-collision with the corpses mirrors his own generation's repeated clashs with mortality.

sum of two units stunning oil paintings, Maria Luisa and The General (both 1958) are playful renditions of tough-minded, full-length Goya portraits. With its wild brushwork and pink, lime and orange pastels, Maria Luisa transcends art-historical honor Bedecked in an A-line dres and orange, bloblike jewels, this figure makes a macabre companion for the creepy cadaverous, sunkencheeked General. Quick charcoal sketches inspired by means of Goya's Burial of the Sardine capture the Spanish painter's taste for grotesquerie. A 1958 drawing of a kewpie-doll-like spectator with a collection of masked gremlins behind her call ups the bitter comedy of Goya's "Caprices." Capturing Goya's angry vigor, II Leccaculo (Equale a Goya) of 1957 outrageously not absents two stylized "ass-lickers," faces buried down-reaching in their work on a pair of corpulent, high-heeled ladies. Too oftentimes dismissed as a mere follower of Picasso, Lebrun had a rancorous passion of his be in possession of perhaps best captured in these fluid, acidic drawings and paintings.

COPYRIGHT 1997 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group