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Estimate: $ 4,000 - $ 6,000
RICO LEBRUN The Crucifixion.
Watercolor, gouache and color oil sticks on paper, 1957. 810x1180 mm; 32x46 1/2 inches. Signed and dated in ink, lower left recto.
Federico Lebrun (1900-1964) was born in Naples, Italy. After graduating secondary school, he joined the Italian Army for two years during World War I. Later he attened the Naples Academy of Beaux Arts and started designing stained glass which granted him a contract in Springfield, Illinois, with the Pittsburg Plate Glass Company. He eventually moved to New York and found work as a commercial artist illustrating for Vogue, Fortune and The New Yorker.
In the late 1920s, Lebrun returned to Italy for several years, focusing on the fresco paintings of the Italian Renaissance. He landed back in New York in 1936 with a teaching position at the Art Studen's League. Thereafter, he began to focus on mural painting, abandoning illustration, and he was commissioned by Harvard University to complete a mural for the upper level of the Fogg Art Museum (for which he earned a prestigious Guggenheim fellowship in both 1936 and 1937). Following this, Lebrun moved to the west coast and became friends with the director of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, who organized his first solo exhibition and later offered him an artist-in-residence position.
Around 1947, Lebrun increasingly chose religious themes and human suffering as subject matter in his art, devoting much of his production in the late 1940s to a Crucifixion series consistng of more than 200 drawings and paintings. Toward the end of his career, in 1958, Lebrun acted as a visiting Lecturer at Yale University before returning to Italy to become artist-in-residence at the American Academy in Rome. In his last few years, he worked on the art faculty at the University of Santa Barbara.
