Leonard Rosenfeld

Leonard Rosenfeld was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1926. He studied painting, sculpture, and drawing at the Art Students League of New York after serving in WWII in the Pacific. He found a place to work near the school and started to paint. By the early 1950s, he was ensconced in the Cedar bar — the abstract expresssionists' hang-out in Greenwich Village. Clement Greenberg, Willem de Kooning, and Allen Ginsberg were in and out of "the Cedar," as were other abstract expressionists, art critics, and beatniks. This was a time when painters
"hung out" together and talked about painting.

In 1957, he did "Railroad Drawings." Martha Jackson showed three of these works in a group exhibition in 1965. Rosenfeld's "look" is expressionistic. In the early 1980s, he exhibited his "rag paintings" in Soho at the so-called "supermarket,” Ivan Karp's OK Harris gallery on West Broadway. Most of the 1980s were devoted to his favorite work — "wire pieces." The work that followed, much of which reflected events of the times, included water colors and oil paintings, perhaps the most significant being his recent oil painting series, "Soldiers and Terrorists," which spanned the period 2003-2007. He is now working on large pastels on paper.