Description

This is a mixed media collage on paper executed by Leo Manso, an abstract artist who was well known and recognized for his collages. His longtime friend Robert Motherwell was a big fan, and so are we. We love the neutral palette of this one with the dab of electric yellow off to the right.  It is subtle, yet complex, with a lot of texture if you look closely. This was probably executed in the 1960s in a combination of paper and casein paint. 

Details

• Leo Manso (American, 1914-1993)
• Untitled collage
• Mixed media paper and casein
  
• Signed lower left
  
• 23" x 37" (overall) 17" x 23" (sight)
• New UV plexiglass in possible original framing; touched-up wear to gilt
  

About the Artist

Born in New York City in 1914, abstract painter Leo Manso studied at the National Academy of Design and the New School for Social Research. He was widely regarded as a leading influence on the art of collage.  According to the Provincetown Artist Registry, his friend Robert Motherwell said "One of collage's masters during the past decade is Leo Manso, whose impeccable sense of placement and musical silence amidst a noisy world calls up the Quattrocento of Manso's beloved Italy, if not its grandeur. Manso's work is small in scale, secular and intimate in its subjects, but no less implacable in its ethical integrity, its aesthetic of formed sensuousness. Seductively beautiful as the work is at first sight, it holds its own like iron, a visual poetry that never compromises, never loses its inner life." 

Manso's work is known for its fluid composition and rich use of color. It is in the permanent collections of MOMA, the Whitney, the Met, the Corcoran Gallery, and the Provincetown Art Association and Museum.  He held more than 40 one man shows in galleries around the world and was a part of numerous important group shows at MOMA and the Whitney. He was a part time resident of Provincetown and a driving force in the development of Provincetown as a leading artists' colony in the 1940s. Manso participated with Hans Hofmann and Jackson Pollock in Provincetown's Forum 49 exhibit and was a co-founder of Gallery 256. In 1958 he and Victor Candell established the Provincetown Workshop, a summer school that attracted artists from around the world; and in 1977 he and Robert Motherwell (among others) established the Long Point Gallery in Provincetown.

Manso joined the faculty of the Art Students League in New York in 1976 and continued to teach there until his death. He also taught at Columbia and NYU and was an artist in residence at Dartmouth in 1985. Married to his wife Blanche for 58 years, he passed away at his home in Manhattan in 1993.