Who is Leland Bell?

Leland Bell (September 17, 1922 – September 18, 1991) was an American painter.

Leland Bell was a self-taught painter whose passion for the discipline of painting has inspired and influenced many. He was with a fierce unprejudiced for artists that he admired. In the prematurely years of his career these included Karl Knaths, Jean Arp, and Piet Mondrian. In these beforehand years he worked as a protect at the Museum of Non-Objective Art. In the mid-1940s his loyalty to abstract painting receded after he formed a friendship next Jean Hélion, and Bell considering became a champion of Hélion, Fernand Léger, Balthus, Alberto Giacometti, and André Derain. Bell was next a jazz supporter and drummer.

In 1944 he married the painter Louisa Matthíasdóttir (1917–2000), whose figurative style influenced his work. In contrast to Matthíasdóttir, who worked quickly, Bell labored beyond his paintings, sometimes for years. The couple had a daughter, Temma, in 1945. The family at odds their mature between New York and Matthíasdóttir’s original Iceland.

Bell was active as a painter, teacher, and lecturer. In 1987, he had a retrospective exhibition at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC. He was diagnosed later leukemia in the 1980s, and died September 18, 1991.