Leo Meissner enrolled at age fifteen
in the Detroit Fine Art Academy where he studied with John P.
Wicker. The exigencies of study without a scholarship or much
financial support from his Bohemian immigrant parents, led young
Leo to have to balance schooling in art with working odd jobs.
On the troop ship to France, Meissner fell in love with the turbulent
swells of the Atlantic and decided that it would be a fine subject
for painting. He pursued the sea as a major theme in his painting
and printmaking for the rest of his life.
After the war, Meissner continued to
study at the Detroit Fine Art Academy where he won a scholarship
to the Art Students League in New York. There he was able to study
painting with Robert Henri and George Luks. With his new-found
skills he got a job as assistant art director on the magazine
Charm. By 1923 he was established enough at his job and had saved
enough money to take a vacation. He had heard that the coast of
Maine would provide good subject matter for a young artist who
wanted to sharpen his skills in drawing and painting rocks, surf,
and sea. After the night boat to Boston he headed to Boothbay
Harbor, Maine and shortly thereafter took a fishing boat to Monhegan
Island. He returned to New York with sketches and drawings that
were to be the basis for a year's work of painting and the determination
to save enough money to return to Monhegan the following year.
Meissner returned to Monhegan virtually every year for more than
a half century.
Although he supported himself in New
York first at Charm magazine and later Motor Boating magazine
and maintained a residence in Yonkers, he was most closely identified
with Monhegan Island. He retired from magazine work in 1950 to
devote his entire artistic effort to his own work--principally
wood engraving in the 1950s and 60s.
Although Meissner was a fine painter,
it is his mastery of woodcut, linoleum block and wood engraving
that makes him the notable artist he is today. The relief block
prints that Meissner produced to great acclaim were exhibited
in virtually every American printmaking exhibition venue. In his
career, which spans over 50 years, Meissner produced more than
150 relief prints.
His landscape subjects are principally drawn from New York City,
the Maine coast and Monhegan Island, rural North Carolina, southern
Florida, and Arizona.
Although Monhegan was the center of
his artistic life and printmaking subjects for most of a half-century,
Meissner also made brilliant Manhattan subjects in the 1920s and
30s including the Plaza Hotel, Future New York, studies of Greenwich
Village and scenes of life in a bygone lower Manhattan. In the
early 1950s he spent time in North Carolina's Great Smoky Mountains
where he chose mountain cabins, rural farms and rushing mountain
streams as subjects. He then spent a season in Arizona in and
around the Oracle Mountains where he contrasted his previous work
in the lush mountains of North Carolina with the craggy, arid
beauty of the desert landscape and flora.
Meissner instituted the Loe J. Meissner
prize in printmaking at the National Academy of Design for excellence
in printmaking. Meissner was first an associate and then a full
academician member of the National Academy of Design, as well
as the Audubon Artists, Society of American Graphic Artists, the
Print Club of Albany, Boston Print Makers, Michigan Academy of
Science, Arts and Letters, the Prairie Print Makers, Old Bergen
Art Guild, Salmagundi Club, Philadelphia Print Club, Boston Society
of Independent Artists, Audubon Artists, and many others.
