Leon Kroll, an American born to immigrant parents, came of age just as the nineteenth century was giving way to the twentieth. The historical practice of art as a means of rendering and understanding the seen world faced the reality of the constantly improving technology of photography. The shape of the future of art was in flux, with no path the obvious victor. Kroll, a cosmopolitan New Yorker, applied the lessons of European modernism to a polyglot American sensibility, forging his own path through the schools and tendencies whirling through the making of American modern art. A romantic realist, his work resonates with a multiplicity of influences acquired from rigorous academic training in America and Paris, supplemented by a varied circle of friends and a wide-ranging curiosity. Kroll brought to his art a prodigious technical talent and an appreciation for beauty that garnered him, through the years, a long list of awards and prizes. Best known as a painter of figures, and especially female nudes, he also produced a large body of landscapes, as well as three major murals. The fact that his work defies easy categorization precisely reflects Kroll’s prickly independence as well as his personal comfort on the margins of the mainstream.
Abraham Leon Kroll (he customarily did not use his first name) was born into a cultured and ambitious family of German immigrant musicians. Intended by his parents to pursue a “safe” career in math, science, or engineering, he decided, instead, to forgo college and become an artist. In 1900, Kroll found work as an assistant in the mural studio of Charles Yardley Turner, an academically trained artist who had been among the founders of the Art Students League and was a member of the Council of the National Academy of Design. The connection proved fortuitous. Kroll began his formal art education at the League, studying in 1901 with the respected American impressionist painter, John Henry Twachtman. Kroll soon translated his family’s urge to succeed into an impressive series of prestigious awards and scholarships in his chosen field. In 1903, he moved to the school at the National Academy of Design, where he notes, “I was by far the best student in the National Academy School.... I think I still hold the record at the Academy school, in all its history, for winning every prize they gave...” In 1907, Kroll won a Hallgarten Fund Special Prize in the Painting School and the First Prize for Composition; in 1908, he took the First Prize for Figure Work in Sculpture Class, the A. A. Baldwin Fund First Prize for Etching, and the Edward Mooney, National Academy Scholarship for Study in Europe. By 1909, Kroll was in Europe, enrolled at the Académie Julian in Paris in the atelier of the academic figure painter, Jean-Paul Laurens, and won First Prize for Painting. Back in New York in 1910, Kroll had a one-man show at the National Academy, where he began teaching in 1911. In 1912, he won the Porter Prize at the Salmagundi Club, and, in 1915, he was awarded a Bronze Medal at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco.
In 1913, Arthur B. Davies and Walt Kuhn, the American organizers of the International Exposition of Modern Art (the so-called Armory Show), invited Kroll to show his big industrial landscape of the New York Central Railroad terminus in Weehawken, New Jersey, Terminal Yards (1912–13, Flint Institute of Fine Arts Museum and Art School, Flint, Michigan). The work attracted the attention of Chicago lawyer and art patron, Arthur Jerome Eddy, who negotiated to buy it and eleven other works from Kroll’s studio (p. 32). In 1915, Kroll contributed seven paintings to the Annual Exhibition of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Between 1911 and 1918, he participated in the cooperative revolving exhibitions that Henri organized at the MacDowell Club. Kroll was living the life of a successful artist, traveling in the summer to scenic locations and spending winter in the studio turning sketches into finished works. In 1916, he was in Eddyville, New York, a town he found so congenial he returned there in 1917. Years later, Kroll recalled Eddyville fondly, his memories sweetened by recollections of a landlady who fed him cheaply, plentifully, and well, and of a pleasant young female companion he found among the local girls.
Kroll remained resolutely committed to representational form even as American abstract art achieved international ascendance. In 1956 he noted, “My sort of painting, for the moment ... is not quite the fashion, right now. The abstract babies are still on deck.... But that kind of thing will get to be such a God-damned bore.... It doesn’t do anything." Kroll gravitated to leadership positions in professional art organizations although he avoided identification with any faction. “All my life I’ve been in important positions to be of service to the other artists." Leon Kroll prided himself on appreciating widely and painting distinctively.
