Reworking a Portrait of the Artist

Rico Lebrun is a familiar name in Los Angeles, where he lived and taught, painted and sculpted in the decades preceding his death in 1964, but his legacy is hard to pin down. David Lebrun, Rico’s son, and James Renner, an artist living in San Diego, co-editors of a recently released book on the artist, both sense a disparity between the power of Lebrun’s work and the amorphous quality of his influence. He’s been misunderstood, David Lebrun contends. He’s underrated, says Renner.

Their efforts, including “In the Meridian of the Heart: Selected Letters of Rico Lebrun,” which was released by publisher David Godine last fall, should help rectify the situation. The book’s focus on the artist’s final decade and a half is echoed in a show of late drawings and paintings that opened Saturday at West Hollywood’s Koplin Gallery, which represents Lebrun’s estate.

If the vigor and complexity of Lebrun’s work open some eyes among the book’s audience, his writing is sure to drop some jaws. He wrote prolifically, continually, and had an unusually vivid grasp of English, which he taught himself when he immigrated to New York from Naples, Italy, in his 20s.

“He was one of those people who studied the dictionary and read great literature, great 19th century literature-a lot of it,” explains David Lebrun, surrounded by his father’s drawings at the gallery. “Among his favorite writers in English were Emily Dickinson and Herman Melville. So he was acquiring this incredible, rich vocabulary not usual for the 20th century. You see a passage of his prose and it’s very distinctive, immediately recognizable.”

In “In the Meridian of the Heart,” letters to his wife and friends include ample hints of Lebrun’s savory style: “I would like someday to be bitten by the fangs of a drawing, a raging mad drawing, so mad that when they try to frame it they all get bitten and drop it like a dog with rabies.”

Writing, for him, was warming up, another form of drawing, a way to exercise the muscles of vision and perception. He’d wake at 4 in the morning, his son recounts, and start writing while his coffee brewed.

“Some of the pieces he wrote were descriptions of what he’d see in the morning-the paper towel roll, the coffeepot, poetry taking off from where he [was]. Sometimes he would write lists of colors or lists of textures. Sometimes he would be working out anger at other artists or at critics who had marginalized him.”

Because he dwelt long and hard in his art on the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust, Lebrun was assumed to be a dark, brooding figure, a characterization that David Lebrun scoffs at and that the artist’s own vibrant and often humorous letters defy. His mode of approaching the figure, through fragmentation, abstraction, repetition and multiple viewpoints, also led to his being miscast.

“There was a tendency among writers to put him in opposition to Abstract Expressionists,” David Lebrun says. “It was an oversimplification that drove Rico nuts, because in many ways he was very close to Abstract Expressionism. It bothered him that people would constantly refer to him as somebody who was a protester against man’s inhumanity to man, that he was a social artist. That was more of a byproduct. His real battle was with the paint and the image.” That intensely personal reckoning with form struck a chord in Renner, who discovered Lebrun after dropping out of Art Center College of Design in Pasadena in the late 1970s. He had been captivated by a Lebrun drawing in a book and sought out more, finally finding-through the machinations of fate, as he describes it-a rare copy of a 1961 book combining the artist’s drawings and autobiographical text.

“I fell in love not only with his work but his writing,” Renner remembers. “He was able to express himself so fluently, with his use of metaphor and analogy, imagery and drama. He was able to pull it off in such a way that seemed very honest to me at the time. It was something that I really needed as a young art student, to find somebody with passion and a certainty about what he was about.”

After years of pursuing more information about Lebrun, spending time with his widow, Constance, and tracking down many previously undiscovered letters, Renner, in collaboration with David Lebrun, put together “In the Meridian of the Heart.” What emerges from the 14-year sequence of letters is a picture of Lebrun as intensely driven, passionate and affectionate. He’s not the tragic figure he’s been made out to be, but he always struggled to push himself into new territory, says David.

“He put huge demands on himself, and was very seldom satisfied with his own work. It bothered him when people put aside big ambitions and stopped failing in a big way. That was his battle.”

Both the new book and the Koplin show pick up at a point, in the early 1950s, when Lebrun’s career was already well-established, but his letters and art reflect that persistent desire to push forward. He had come to Southern California in the late ‘30s, following a decade as a commercial artist in New York.

By the late 1940s, Lebrun’s career was in full bloom. Life magazine printed a spread on his “Crucifixion” series of 1947-50, an ambitious group of paintings and drawings influenced by Picasso’s “Guernica” and Grunewald’s Isenheim altarpiece, woven together with elements of the California landscape and the dark disasters of World War II.

“He reached the end of that cycle and exhaustive dialogue with these masters and he had an urge to put things together again from scratch,” David Lebrun says. “He went down to Mexico [in 1952-53] and began to do things out of torn scraps of paper. That’s when he really began to work with collage, finding bits of motif in the landscape and the marketplace.”

There he was at a peak in recognition for his work, says the artist’s son, “taking it all apart and doing something different. He was retooling, working on the fundamentals of a new language, a new vocabulary, trying to come up with a way of doing things that moves beyond his relationship with his masters and mentors.”

The second section of the book and gallery show chronicles a challenging period for Lebrun. In 1958, he went to New Haven, Conn., to spend a year as a visiting artist at Yale, in a department headed by Josef Albers. “He was Albers’ diametrical opposite,” David Lebrun says. “Albers was Germanic and precise, and Rico was Italian and passionate.” In a letter to one of his former students, Lebrun summarized the dramatic contrast between their sensibilities as “the idea of soul in trouble against the idea of the virtuoso color chart.”

That unhappy stint was followed by an equally devastating trip to Italy, his first return since the ‘30s.

“He found his city was still a bombed-out ruin,” David says. “Naples had not been reconstructed at the time, and he found all of his friends and family basically bombed-out ruins. Their ambitions had been cut short; they’d been completely traumatized by the war. It was hugely painful for him to be among them, to be in that place. He had a very tough time and went into a depression, which he struggled to get through.” He navigated out of it, in part, through his cutting humor. In a drawing from this period in the Koplin show, Lebrun pictures himself as a cannon, reaching back to light his own tail so he can propel himself back into his work. The last phase of his life, upon his return to L.A., was indeed something of a grand finale, beginning with a commissioned mural at Pomona College.

“In the course of doing that mural,” David says, “he really seemed to have found a voice that he never had before, a language that was wholly his own, his own way of dealing with X-ray vision, multiple-view vision, inside-outside views of the human body.”

The mural’s theme was Genesis, and it did prove generative for Lebrun, launching a new series of “flood figures” inspired by statuary he had seen at the ancient baths of Rome. The underwater figures were stripped down, missing arms and legs and heads, and surrounded by darkness. “They were organic forms, and much quieter than anything he had done before. The agitated surfaces of things were going away, the action was going away, he was getting down to a core. He really felt that he was getting it, that he had arrived somewhere. And that was when he got ill.”

Lebrun was diagnosed with cancer in 1963 and died the following year. David, who was studying philosophy at Reed College, in Oregon, returned home to be with his parents, and eventually graduated with a filmmaking degree from UCLA. He has made numerous documentary films specializing in anthropological subjects, but he’s never made a film about his father. That started him wondering, not long ago, if Rico Lebrun had any influence on his work at all, “and I realized that all my films have a preponderance of imagery of organic forms emerging from darkness. I was 20 years into making films and said, ‘Oh!’ It wasn’t a conscious thing.”

For David, “In the Meridian of the Heart” represents, perhaps, a step toward a larger, monographic project. No single, authoritative sourcebook has been published on Lebrun’s life. The last book dedicated to his work was the 1961 volume of drawings that had such a profound impact on Renner. Renner’s hope is that the new book reaches even one or two people in the same way that Lebrun’s art and writings reached him, a disenchanted young art student who found in Lebrun a mentor, “a giant figure to hold on to.”

*

IN THE MERIDIAN OF THE HEART: PAINTINGS AND DRAWINGS BY RICO LEBRUN, Koplin Gallery, 464 N. Robertson Blvd., West Hollywood. Dates: Through June 2. Closed Sunday and Monday. Phone: (310) 657-9843.