Failing Light is a color serigraph (screenprint) from 1955 by American artist Leonard Edmondson. It is pencil signed and titled, and was printed by the artist in an edition of 50 on ivory laid paper. The image measures 11 x 16-3/4 inches.
Launching his distinctive style influenced by the surrealism of Paul Klee, Edmondson's imagery invokes 'almost remembered' forms, feelings and spaces. He transformed the opaque, flat surfaces that defined the serigraphs of the WPA era into transparent compositions, microcosms of life forms that exist in a hostile, apparently lifeless, environment.
Leonard Edmondson, painter, printmaker, educator, and author, was born in Sacramento, California on June 21, 1916. He studied at Los Angeles City College, and in 1937, entered the University of California at Berkeley, receiving his B.A. degree in 1940 and his M.A. degree in 1942. Between 1942 and 1946, Edmondson served in the U.S. Army in Military Intelligence. During these years, he traveled through Europe where he viewed a body of work by Paul Klee. Immediately after the war, he explored the collections of the Louvre.
Returning to California in 1947, Edmondson accepted the first teaching position of his distinguished career at the Pasadena City College. He also taught at the Otis Art Institute, University of California at Berkeley (summers of 1960 and 1964), Pratt Institute in 1961, and in 1964, he was appointed chairman of the printmaking department at California State University in Los Angeles and he remained there until his retirement in 1986.
Edmondson took a class in etching from Ernest Freed in 1951 and the following year his print, Heralds of Inquiry, won an award at an annual exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. His first solo museum exhibition at the De Young Memorial Museum in 1952 was followed by solo exhibitions at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena and the Santa Barbara Museum. He won his first Tiffany Fellowship in 1953 and the second in 1955. Edmondson was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1960, which allowed him to focus on his printmaking. In 1967 a retrospective of his work was held at the San Francisco Museum of Art and he published his technical treatise, Etching, in 1970. He was a member of and exhibited with the California Watercolor Society and the California Printmakers Society.
Edmondson’s work is represented in the collections of the Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Dallas Museum of Fine Art, Texas; the Detroit Institute of Arts Museum, Michigan; the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New York Public Library, New York; Oakland Museum of California Art, California; the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, California; the Seattle Art Museum, Washington; the National Gallery, Washington, D.C.; and the Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts.
Leonard Edmondson died in Pasadena, California
on July 22, 2002.
