November 23 – December 14, 1971
Art Gallery, Eugenia Fuller Atwood Library
1971 BEAVER NEWS
“Charles LeClair Exhibition One-Man ‘Roman Portfolio’”
Charles LeClair, husband of Dean Margaret LeClair, and distinguished American artist and dean of the Temple University Tyler School of Art, is holding a one-man show entitled “A Roman Portfolio” at Beaver College. The opening of this exhibition of paintings was held on Tuesday evening, November 23 and will continue through December 14.
Mr. LeClair has held one-man shows in Rome, Italy; five in New York, and more than a score of solo exhibitions in Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Philadelphia and other cities in the United States. He has won numerous awards, including the Pennell Memorial Award from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1965. He is represented in many permanent collections, including the Albright-Knox gallery in Buffalo and the Pittsburgh Hundred Friends of Art. Mr. LeClair has exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Carnegie Institute, and the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Arts.
In discussing his work, Mr. [LeClair] said, “I do not like to stand still and, over the years, my work has developed and changed. But in 1964 I became intrigued with the painting-portfolio idea, which I borrowed from the printmakers who like to make a series of etchings or lithographs on a particular theme that is then presented as a single, larger work. So I am now thinking in terms of a sequence of images that go together and are related also in respect to certain formal decisions that rule the entire portfolio.
“In 1964 to 1965 there was a ‘Civil Rights’ portfolio, and now the ‘Roman Portfolio,’ a substantial part of which is included in the current exhibition at Beaver. The point is that each group of works is different from the other. It is fun, and challenging, to work in this way with a continuing problem, variations of a theme, rather than thinking of each canvas as a separate entity.”
Mr. LeClair pointed out that the paintings in this current exhibition “interpret Rome in terms of ancient architecture, on the one hand, and modern advertising pasted over it, on the other. Each canvas relates a painted image to one in collage, and every composition is symmetrical in plan, as indeed Roman architecture, itself, is. In the process of combining painted with pasted-on images, and through working with equally measured spatial areas, and in some cases these areas are separate canvases that are framed together, a good many ironics come into play. My romantic feeling for the heroic theme is countered by some pungent modern reality, like an advertisement for a bathing suit or Sexyboy magazine. But this is the way Rome is.”
Before coming to Temple University in 1960, Mr. LeClair was a member of the faculty at Chatham College. He was instrumental in establishing the Tyler School of Art in Rome in 1966.
Gallery hours are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays and 2 to 5 p.m. on weekends.
