Leonard Nelson

Sam Hunter

"Leonard Nelson's career as a prolific artist and influential art educator spanned more than half the twentieth century, from the thirties to the nineties, and forged close links with the leading artists and movements of that time in American art history. Although he spent most of his life in Philadelphia, his roots were in New York, and in the works he showed in the forties and fifties at the Betty Parsons and Peridot Galleries, and at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century during the forties and fifties. They placed him at the forefront of the emerging New York Abstract Expressionist avant-garde. Nelson's artistic and cultural interests were even wider and more challenging than some of his more famous New York colleagues; in his Philadelphia studio he explored avenues as diverse as welded sculpture, incorporationg scrap or found objects, and printmaking, a medium that established...