Rico Lebrun
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BORN IN NAPLES, Italy, in 1900, Rico Lebrun at a very early age developed the absorbing interest in draftsmanship which is an earmark of his mature art. His only professional training was received at the night classes of the Naples Academy of Art. One questions whether he needed any formal training at all. His atavistic instinct for drawing was so strong that very likely his remarkable linear proficiency was the result of a relentness self-instruction.
Lebrun came to America in 1924 and has lived here ever since, becoming one of our foremost artists and also, despite his courageous detachment from prevailing, organized movements, an inspirational teacher. He had served in the Italian Army during World War I. Remembering war's horrors, he completed during the early 1940's some pictures of crippled men fleeing a bombardment, their contorted postures summarizing the extraordinary resilience of human energy in the face of disaster. A sensitive, intelligent humanist, Lebrun had always been most interested in subjects involving anguished and violent challenges to the spirit of the living. Whether painting the bloody struggle between man and beast in the West's slaughter houses, or defining the sad patience of Italy's beggars, he had revived the compassionate dramaturgy of the Baroque masters and their 19th-century successors in Romanticism.
Lebrun inevitably was drawn to the theme of the Crucifixion, and on the theme in recent years has completed a long series of pictures, culminating in an immense triptych. In describing the series, he has declared: "My choice of the theme, Crucifixion, was prompted by the constantly repeated history of man's blindness and inhumanity. My painter's language is founded on the belief of a traditional function of art, that is, to communicate, through dramatic presentation, a legend; a story."
Lebrun teached and working at Mexico's Instituto Allende. He wrote: "As it happens, I am in the midst of the most impressive and hopeful mess you ever saw, and naturally so involved in it that my past work seems miles away."
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