Leonard Nelson had a career as a prolific artist and influential art educator that 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. His works were exhibited in the forties and fifties at the Betty Parsons and Peridot Galleries, and at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century gallery during the forties and fifties. These exhibitions 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, incorporating scrap or found objects, and printmaking, a medium that established him among the innovators of the day.

He also taught at the Moore College of Art in Philadelphia for thirty years, retiring as professor emeritus in 1977, and concentrating on paintings that over the decades underwent a remarkable transformation. From his pioneering, mid-century figurative studies that are formidably primitive like those of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning or the pictographs of Adolph Gottlieb, Nelson progressed to large-scale abstract impressionist canvases. However, he was an unrecognized champion of American abstract impressionism. Nelson's work was constantly evolving, in keeping with his openness to novel areas, techniques and mediums.

Not long before his death in 1993, Nelson expressed great pride in his role as an avant-garde force in art education and in his ongoing willingness to cross conventional boundaries -- whether in his personal studio work or in his interdisciplinary approach and public projects. Nelson left an extensive body of work in paintings and printmaking.

In 2001, Rizzoli published Leonard Nelson, by Sam Hunter, Professor Emeritus of art history at Princeton University and a leading critic and historian of modern and contemporary art. This book is the first volume devoted to the artist's work. Following are quotes from that book: "Leonard Nelson was one of the least appreciated, though deserving, artists of indisputable quality in the legendary New York School. " "Owing to some personal reticence and his choice of Philadelphia over New York as his primary theater of operations, Nelson was denied his proper place in this great new constellation of talent.

Despite his early decision to dissociate himself physically and ideologically from the New York art world, he became one of our most independent, although by choice isolated, modernists. His most persuasive legacy are the powerful visual statements themselves that Nelson left behind at the time of his death at 81 in 1993, in a surprisingly extensive inventory of some 600 paintings and more than a thousand drawings and prints."

Nelson's work is also included in the recently published, American Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s: An Illustrated Survey, edited by Marika Herskovic, Ph. D. and released by the New York School Press in 2003. Written and submitted April 2004 by Brent Byrne, The Leonard Nelson Collection