Death & Transfiguration

At 6 o'clock every weekday morning, a small, wiry man in a khaki shirt and faded blue jeans hurries across Los Angeles' San Vicente Boulevard, enters a grimy old commercial building, and climbs the stairs to a large studio. There, Painter Rico Lebrun finds himself in what looks like a cooled-off hell. The walls are lined with massive, tortured figures drawn on huge pieces of parchment. A decapitated man holds his head in his hands; an adjoining figure is riven from neck to thigh; a third figure turns slowly into a serpent. These, along with similar drawings on display this week at the University of Southern California, are the sketches for a series of paintings Lebrun is making to illustrate Dante's Inferno--the latest work of an artist whose obsession is the suffering of mankind.

To most critics, Italian-born Rico Lebrun, 60, ranks today not only as the West Coast's most formidable talent, but one of the finest of those painters who work in the tradition of Goya. Syracuse University recently acquired his huge triptych on the Crucifixion; Pomona College has his majestic Genesis mural, completed early this year; the University of California Press has just published a handsome book of his drawings. At first glance, all this might seem to be the work of a bitter and sick imagination; but the man himself is exactly the opposite. "People think I am the most melancholy fellow around," says Lebrun. "Not so'. I'm no undertaker. I am anti-death."

Titian's Secret. Rico Lebrun came to the U.S. at 24, when the Naples stained-glass factory for which he was working got a contract from a branch of the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Co. in Springfield, Ill. Giving up glassmaking a year later, he went on to a stint as a commercial artist (he did ads for Peck & Peck and spot drawings for The New Yorker), a couple of Guggenheim fellowships, posts at various U.S. colleges and universities. His serious paintings and drawings were from the start shrill cries of pain. There are two kinds of artist, says Lebrun: some who follow the classical duty of putting order into an event, and "others who bring their vulnerable selves to an event, get hit, and then make some sort of statement about it. I am of the second type."

Lebrun has little use for those obsessed by technique, or for those who endlessly dissect the old masters to find some secret gimmick. "The secret of Titian," says he, "is that he was Titian." In his drawings, Lebrun aims first for speed, in order to get his whole vision down before it shreds apart in his mind. He starts with black, white and grey, which he regards as the colors of memory. When the first sketch is finished, it can be reworked indefinitely. Gradually the work takes on depth, as if it had been built up layer upon layer.

Partisan of Mankind. In the last 20 years, Lebrun has moved from drawings and wash paintings as direct and simple as those of the Renaissance to increasingly tumid and tormented shapes that at times border on abstraction. But in all his work, he insists, "the human condition is the only valid theme. I am a partisan of mankind." Then why must mankind always be shown mutilated and degraded? Says Lebrun: "I wanted to remember that our image, even when disfigured by adversity, is grand in meaning; that no brutality will ever cancel that meaning, and that a painting can enhance the meaning by changing what is disfigured into something that is transfigured." His tortured figures do not admit that they might die; instead, in suffering they still hold to life.

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