25 Years After a Collection Uncovered (A Lenn Redman Retrospective)
Article Transcript
When Leonard “Lenn” Redman passed away 25 years ago his son Mark Redman didn’t have the heart to go through his father’s personal effects. Instead, he asked a cousin to pack up all the belongings in his father’s Los Angeles apartment and ship them to him in Georgia. The boxes sat in storage until recently when Redman was able to spend time going through them all.
That’s when Redman realized his father had left him the things he loved the most. He found his father’s personal collection of fine art, caricature art, animation art, commercial art, vintage books, photographs and reference materials from his 50+ year career, as a caricaturist, animator and artist in Chicago and L.A. from the 1930s to ’80s.
Since he discovered the treasure, Redman has used his spare time to begin organizing the collection. In the past year, Redman has scanned and framed around 100 pieces of his father’s work and placed them onto almost every wall of his home, complete with related pictures and documents from the different eras.
Brenau University in Georgia is now assisting Redman in preserving the historically significant collection. Brenau currently has students working at Redman’s home to curate the collection and produce various traveling exhibits. You can follow along as the interns go through the boxes and uncover the next treasure. They post their discoveries at www.lennredman.com, lennredman fan page on FaceBook and Twitter at @lennredman. Redman plans to sell reproductions of selected images and pursue image licensing opportunities.
Lenn was born in Chicago in 1912 and began his apprenticeship as a caricaturist during the Great Depression. He sold his caricatures at the Grant Park outdoor art shows for 25 cents. In 1933 he started his professional career drawing caricatures for audiences at the Artist Colony during Chicago’s own “Century of Progress” World’s Fair.
In the mid-30s, Lenn moved to Hollywood and became an animator. He worked on Fantasia for Walt Disney, Porky Pig for Leon Schlessinger and on various other animated movies. In 1939 Lenn traveled cross country to draw caricatures in the Artist Colony at the World’s Fair in New York City.
Lenn went on to settle in Chicago in 1941 and remained there until the mid-60s. He started the Lenn Redman Commercial Art Studio, differentiating himself in the advertising field by humanizing animals and inanimate objects. This was possibly the first commercial use of anthropomorphism. His clients were America’s top companies, including Illinois Tool Works, Walgreens, Time Inc. and Saturday Evening Post. He also loved to teach caricaturing which he did at various schools, including the Art Institute of Chicago.
Lenn was also an entertainer and performed at night clubs, on TV and even on the radio. He drew uncanny renderings of people who called in to the Jack Eigen radio show, broadcast from Chicago’s glamorous Chez Paree nightclub—a feat that was chronicled in a March 9, 1958, article in the Chicago Sunday Tribune Magazine.” Lenn filled in as illustrator of the Mary Worth comic strip for a time as well.
Lenn moved to LA in the mid-60s and animated various cartoon series for Hanna-Barbera and Filmation. His credits are listed at www.IMDB.com. He also continued working on his book ‘How To Draw Caricatures’.
The 60s were a turbulent time and Lenn became very concerned about the direction of our country. He decided to leave the animation field and spend his remaining years producing materials he felt would help offset both national and racial prejudice. He wrote a poem called ‘What Am I?’ and illustrated and self-published it in the form of a book, a coloring book and 11 large prints suitable for framing.
Mark has produced selected images from this portfolio. One is the “Black Earth.” It’s an image Lenn drew in 1972 that was ahead of its time. “Take a close look at what the characters on the black earth are doing to each other,” says Redman, “About the only thing my father left out was a BP oil well spilling into the black water.”
Lenn became an internationally known Caricaturist and added Animator, Artist, Author, Poet, Illustrator, Entertainer and Civil Rights Activist to his credits before his death in 1987.
His book ‘How To Draw Caricatures’, was published in 1984 and still sells well today. “It’s amazing how many artists have this book on their shelves,” Redman says. “We’re also finding that the 3D caricature generators for today’s facial recognition and animation programs may be based on Lenn’s caricaturing formula as originally outlined in the book.”
Mark was also surprised to uncover a large oil painting of Salvador Dalí. Lenn’s range of artistic talent continued to the end with his final works being a totally new art form. The works are so unique Redman calls them abstract fine art caricatures or “Articatures.” Lenn took aspects of his favorite painter’s style and used it to create and blend in a fine art caricature of the painter within his own masterpiece. Additional paintings utilizing this technique include Picasso, Chagall, Matisse, Miro, Klein, Pollack and others.
Lenn produced over 200,000 caricatures and other works of art during his 50+ years as a professional artist. Most pieces hang in the homes of his clients throughout the world. If you have a piece of his art or a story about Lenn, please share it with the Redman family by contacting them at www.lennredman.com.
Stories and images will be collected with the vision of locating as many caricatures as possible and displaying them as a single exhibit at a major museum. “Major museums haven’t been receptive to displaying my father’s artwork because he was a caricaturist,” Redman says. “I believe an art collection of this magnitude, including the stories behind the caricatures of everyday Americans, would be an “Americana Art” collection that would be hard to ignore.”
“I sense my father looking down on his only child discovering what he was hoping to have communicated to me: It is now my legacy to bring his artwork to the public,” Redman says. And he seems well on his way to making that happen.
Ms. Mitchell is a freelance photographer and writer in the Atlanta area and has been chronicling the collection’s development since its inception.
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