TitleKerouan I
Artist
Leo Manso
(American, 1914 - 1993)
Date1977
MediumAcrylic on canvas
DimensionsUnframed: 49 7/8 × 39 7/8 in.
Framed: 51 × 41 × 2 3/4 in.
SignedSigned at bottom right corner: "Manso".
SubmissionNA diploma presentation, December 5, 1984
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, NY
Object number1984.36
Label TextKnown as a painter, collagist, and graphic artist, Leo Manso was born in New York and after graduating from high school followed a traditional art curriculum. He enrolled in the evening antique drawing class at the National Academy of Design from 1930 to 1931, and subsequently studied drawing at The New School for Social Research until 1933. In 1948 Manso was invited to exhibit with the American Abstract Artists group at their annual exhibition (he would join the group in 1955). It was also around this time that the artist began to summer in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he exhibited with artists such as Hans Hofmann, Jackson Pollock, and Adolph Gottlieb. In 1953 Manso co-founded the 256 Gallery in Provincetown along with Will Barnet, NA, Byron Browne, Peter Busa, Seong Moy, and others.Manso first became interested in collage around 1955 when making a correction on a ruined drawing. This particular aesthetic would permeate his work for the rest of his life, leading his friend Robert Motherwell, ANA, to write: "One of collage's masters during the past decade is Leo Manso. . . . 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." Indeed, visual poetry is an apt description of Manso's collages as many are works of subtle beauty layered in both a visual and metaphorical sense. Manso was extremely sensitive to societal conditions and aware of the inherent responsibilities of the artist, and his work was often a response to or reflection of these conditions. He wrote: "To be an artist one is obligated to investigate the human condition. To do this one must have curiosity, continually growing knowledge, and courage, for often the conclusions discovered are not conventional or convenient, and the artist must stand up for his discoveries." The formal elements of his compositions had great significance for Manso and in his search to find a universal abstract language Manso wrote that he "went through considerable experimentation with collage and assemblage hoping to reach out to new technical alternatives to the brush. . . . I limited my pictorial vocabulary to the circle and the square, and their variants."
Manso was an intrepid traveler, visiting Mexico, Africa, India, Nepal, and Europe, and was always deeply affected by his journeys. His first trip to Africa was in the early 1970s, and in 1975 he traveled to Tunisia with fellow artists Joseph De Martini, NA, Michael Lekakis, and Henry Rothman. With Rothman, Manso retraced the route that artists Paul Klee and August Macke took in 1914 through Tunisia and based the subsequent series of works on what he saw there. He stated that two themes ran through his work: "The distillation of landscape experience is one . . . the other-a symbolic concretion of philosophic values." "Kerouan I" is one of the larger works from this series and incorporates Manso's collage aesthetic into this painting while combining these two themes. Kerouan, or Kairouan, is a Muslim holy city and pilgrimage site in Tunisia, and the crenellated walls and archways of some of its buildings are suggested in Manso's repeated block forms and large circular element. The Arabic script is fragmented and rotated ninety degrees to the right. Only partially legible, it appears to refer to the word "Arabic" (in the 5th line) and was used by Manso as ornamentation to elicit a sense of enigmatic exoticism.
MNP
