Leon Goldin is a true believer in the oldtime religion of modern art…. Once we're in, we realize what a shiver of excitement runs just beneath the surface of the work. Several memorable drawings are of a small hill with, at

its top, a stand of trees. It's a motif that goes way, way back, beyond Cezanne and Courbet to Giorgione. In Goldin's hands the vignette has summary power. The evocation of time and place and space is so abbreviated, it's almost

heartbreaking. Goldin's drawings are tough but elegiac. The planes of color are like fragments of stained glass seen in fading light.

Jed Perl, The New Criterion, 1993

 

Many artists take inspiration from the natural world, but few inhabit it as thoroughly as Leon Goldin... Mr. Goldin achieves an elegance so roughhewn and true that it can't help but make the heart beat faster.

The New York Observer, November 6, 2000

 

Leon Goldin was born in 1923 in Chicago, where he attended the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1952, he won the Fulbright Scholarship in Painting and three years later the prestigious Prix de Rome, which brought him to the American Academy in Rome. In Europe, he motorcycled through Italy and France with his wife Meta visiting cathedrals and remote villages in search of medieval and renaissance treasures, finding a particular connection in the frescoes of Piero Della Francesca, a lifelong love and influence In New York, he showed at the Kraushaar Galleries, winning numerous fellowships for his tough, postmodern landscapes and cityscapes, including an award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, The National Endowment for the Arts, The Guggenheim Fellowship in Painting and a Ford Foundation Purchase Prize.

 

His work is represented by The Baltimore Museum of Art, The Brooklyn Museum, The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, The National Academy of Design in New York, The Oakland Art Museum, The University of Southern California as well as many other museums and numerous public and private collections. Leon Goldin suffered from Parkinsons during the last ten years of his life. Miraculously, his hand shook less when it had a paintbrush in it, and he continued to work till the last few months of his life, moving back and forth on his paintspattered walker to produce some of his best work. He passed away peacefully in 2009 with the simple comforting words, "Everybody dies."

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