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This work exhibits a careful balancing of form and color.  The flow of the red tam into the green scarf enlivens the simplified volumes of the face.

Kroll's traditional approach was at odds with the modernist artist's desire to experiment with new styles and methods.

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Leon Kroll

The Red Tam, 1928

oil on canvas

19 ½ x 15 in.

Purchased from the George T. Carleton Bequest

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Leon Kroll, who was born in New York City, became interested in art as a child. He studied at the Art Students League in New York and at the Acadèmie Julian in Paris, where he won the Grand Prix for painting the nude. Although the Ashcan School painters were his friends, Kroll’s realism favored female figures that are often idealized and contemplative, rather than the gritty urban realism of the Ashcan artists. In addition to single female figures, Kroll painted figural groups, landscapes and still lifes. Kroll’s traditional approach to painting and his choice of conventional subjects were at odds with some of the modernist, experimental attitudes of his day. He regarded stable design as the most important element of painting, and his works exhibit a careful balancing of form and color, often achieving a grand, almost classical, order. Despite being a traditionalist in a fast-moving modernist art world, Kroll achieved great success in his lifetime and won almost every major painting prize.

The Red Tam exhibits Kroll’s careful balancing of form and color. The flow of the red tam into the green scarf enlivens the simplified volumes of the sitter’s face. The painting is one of three Kroll portraits of the daughter of American sculptor Hermon MacNeil. Kroll said he loved to paint figures clothed and unclothed, “the look in their eyes, their gestures, but all of this organized, with all the care and judgment I am capable of, into a beautiful design.”

Reference

Nancy Hale and Fredson Bowers. Leon Kroll: A Spoken Memoir, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983. ISBN: 0813909929

Valerie Ann Leeds.  Leon Kroll: Revisited, Santa Fe: Gerald Peters Gallery, 1998. ISBN-13: 978-0935037753