About the Artist

Leonard Edmondson was born in Sacramento, California and studied at the University of California, Berkeley where he earned a Master's Degree in 1942. During World War II, he served in the United States Army and then settled in Pasadena. By 1947, he was on the faculty at Pasadena City College and began exhibiting his abstract expressionist paintings, which by the 1950s, were attracting national attention. Major museums including the Metropolitan, Brooklyn and Museum of Modern Art purchased his work. His talent brought him two Tiffany Fellowship awards as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship.

An abstract expressionist painter, printmaker of colored etchings and art educator, Leonard Edmondson spent his career in California where he served as President of the California Watercolor Society and of the Los Angeles Printmaking Society. At the Watercolor Society's annual exhibits at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Edmondson was one of the first "radically modern" painters to have his work accepted. He was also a member of the San Francisco Art Association and the Los Angeles Art Association.

Edmondson was an influential teacher, especially of printmaking, which he taught at Otis Art Institute and the California State University in Los Angeles as well as at Pasadena City College.

Edmondson’s work is represented in the collections of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Brooklyn Museum, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, Dallas Museum of Fine Art, Detroit Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery, New York Public Library, Oakland Museum of California Art, Pasadena Art Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Seattle Art Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Worcester Art Museum.

Leonard Edmondson died in Pasadena, California on July 22, 2002.

Sources: Gordon T. McClelland and Jay T. Last, "California Watercolors, 1850-1970", via AskArt; Annex Galleries