Mr. Kroll's Hobby

"His new one-man show at the Carnegie Institute," reported Pittsburgh Critic Douglas Naylor, "is almost overloaded with nudes. There are six out of 37 canvases."

Six nudes out of 37 pictures is no overload for Artist Leon Kroll, 50, who opened two important exhibitions of his work, one at the Carnegie Institute, the other at the Milch Galleries in Manhattan. A persistent prizewinner since 1912, a National Academician, an able landscape painter, few artists since Titian have had a more wholehearted delight in the female figure.

"Mr. Kroll's hobby," explain his friends, "is pretty women." When he is not painting them, he likes to show them his one brown eye, one blue, make conversation by asking which they prefer. His cinema heroines are Mae West and Jean Harlow. Flippant and temperamental. Artist Kroll works hard at his painting and his beautiful young French wife sometimes takes her knitting to the studio while he paints. With her and his bilingual daughter he speaks French.

Born in Manhattan of impoverished musical parents. Artist Kroll used to haunt the old red brick & granite Metropolitan museum as a child. Not until he was about 12 did he get nerve enough to climb the stairs past the dusty plaster casts of the ground floor to the paintings on the floor above. The Metropolitan was a far different place then from the great treasure house that it has since become, but it had Rosa Bonheur's Horse Fair, Meissoniers Friedland, and Leutze's Washington Crossing the Delaware. Little Leon Kroll swore that he would become a painter, did so well that today the Metropolitan owns two Kroll paintings, one pencil drawing.

He worked his way through the Art Students' League by washing brushes and sweeping floors, studied under the late John H. Twachtman, then in Paris with Jean Paul Laurens. His first real encouragement came from venerable Winslow Homer. He made friends with three contemporaries who were quick to gain nationwide reputations: George Bellows, Robert Henri, Eugene Speicher, and all of them, the latter particularly, influenced his work.

Since then Kroll landscapes, Kroll portraits and Kroll nudes have won him many prizes, jobs as lecturer and instructor, a comfortable living, a beautiful wife, and a commission to paint murals in the Attorney General's room in the new Department of Justice building at Washington.

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