Leon Kroll began his career as an artist at the age of fifteen, assisting Charles Yardley Turner in drawing plans and elevations of the grounds and buildings of the Pan-American Exposition to be held in Buffalo, New York in 190l. Turner was then president of New York's Art Students League, and when the Exposition project was finished he directed Kroll to study at the League and helped him get an office job there so he could cover expenses. His first teacher at the League was John H. Twachtman. He entered the Academy school in 1904, where he studied with Charles C. Curran, Francis Coates Jones, George W. Maynard, Charles W. Mielatz, and Hermon MacNeil over the next four years. The summer of 1906 he had a scholarship which allowed him to go to Woodstock, New York, where he painted with Paul Daugherty and John Burroughs. The next summer he was able to pass painting in Maine; there he had occasion to meet Winslow Homer and receive the senior artist's comments on his work, which greatly impressed him. Kroll won most of the prizes the Academy school offered, and in 1908 he received the premier award it had to give: the Edward L. Mooney Traveling Scholarship. With this financial support he went to Paris and study with Jean Paul Laurens at the Acad‚mie Julian. He continued to win school prizes at the Acad‚mie, exhibited at some of the major Paris shows, and came under the influence of the Impressionists and especially Cezanne.
Upon his return from Europe in 1910, Kroll, as a Mooney scholarship recipient, was allowed to mount a one-man exhibition of works he had done in Paris at the Academy. Like the many one-man exhibitions he would subsequently have, it was a critical as well as financial success. He also began his first period of teaching at the Academy school in 1910, which continued into 1918. Kroll began to paint views of New York, especially the bridges and central park. One of this series, The Brooklyn Bridge, was admired by George Bellows who saw it hanging at an Academy exhibition. This was Kroll's first contact with the artists associated with "The Eight," and soon he was exhibiting with them at the MacDowell Club.
Kroll was invited to exhibit in the 1913 Armory Show; the work he showed, Weehawken Heights, was purchased by Arthur Jerome Eddy. In general his work was beginning to sell, and he could afford to return to Europe in 19l4. He painted at Fontainebleau and Barbizon, and visited Spain. On his return home later that year, he renewed his relationships with William Glackens, John Sloan, Eugene Speicher, Robert Henri, and George Bellows who was a particularly close friend and strong influence on the character of his work. Kroll was again in France in 1923, and there married Genevieve Maria Therese Domec, to whom he had been introduced by Robert and Sonia Delaunay. With this reinforcement of ties with France, throughout the 1920s he passed extended periods abroad. It was following his marriage that Kroll began the life-long habit of summering at Folley Cove on Cape Ann in Massachusetts.
Kroll's popularity was at its height in the 1930s. He won numerous awards at the major annual exhibitions of contemporary art mounted by museums, the most notable being the first prize in the Carnegie Institute International Exhibition of 1936. In Academy exhibitions he had won the Clarke Prize in the annual of 192l; Altman prizes in the winter exhibitions of 1922 and 1932; and received another Altman in the annual of 1935. (He would continue to receive honors from the Academy throughout his long history of participation in its annuals: the Obrig Prize, 1943; Anonymous Prize, 1949; Altman prizes; 1965 and 1969; and the Saltus, 1966.) The 1930s also saw Kroll's second period of teaching at the Academy school; he was again a faculty member from 1931 into 1938.
Like so many American painters in this period, Kroll turned to mural painting in the later 1930s, and proved exceptionally successful in these monumentally scaled compositions. Among his works in this form are: lunettes, Defeat and Triumph of Justice, for the Attorney General of the United States's office, Justice Department Building, Washington, D. C., 1935-37; the World War I Memorial Chamber, Worcester (Massachusetts) Auditorium, 1939-4l; a mosaic for the dome of the chapel at Omaha Beach, Normany, France; and on an Abbey Mural Fund commission administered by the Academy, three panels on history, agriculture and industry for the Senate Chamber of the Indiana State Capitol, Indianapolis, 1953.
Among Kroll's many memberships and honors were presidency of the American Society of Painters, Sculptors, and Engravers, 1931-35; election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and in 1943, its vice presidency; and election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1954. In 1956 he was made a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor. He served on the Academy Council from 1943 to 1947, but returned to its school faculty in 1959, the year of the schools revitalization with the opening of its present building, and remained one of its most influential teachers until his retirement in 1968. In 1971, the Academy conferred on Kroll its President's Gold Medal.
Kroll's admiration of the work of Poussin, Renoir, and Cezanne is reflected in the classically articulated, solid forms of his landscapes, complex figural compositions, portraits, and especially his studies of the nude.
