Arthur Lerner

"Blaze of illuminations turns heads in delight" was the headline when Alan Artner, the Chicago Tribune's distinguished art critic reviewed a show of Arthur Lerner's paintings. He wrote, "Each year at this time Arthur Lerner goes out to his island in Maine for a summer of landscape painting . . . the works he produces inevitably depict rocks bleached with the natural light and veiled with the mist that intervenes between his boat and the shore." His review continues, "One is struck by the hard-headed poetry of the pictures each having the freshness of discovery."

It is not surprising that with an education at the Art Institute of Chicago plus extensive post graduate work at the Academia de la Grand Chaumiere, Paris, and the Istituto Statale di Belle Arti, Florence, coupled with those natural gifts recognized very early in his life, Arthur Lerner's paintings continue to garner wide audiences and please a select following of devoted collectors.

The Art Institute of Chicago, the Continental Bank of Illinois, the Northern Trust Bank of Illinois, the Harry S. Truman College collection and Joseph Shapiro Collection continue to select Lerner paintings as they increase their holdings. He has enjoyed one-man shows as well as two and three person shows and in America and abroad has also been included in numerous group exhibitions.

Lerner is known especially for the unbelievable intensity of his colors, particularly for water and sky.

Again, it was noted in a major Illinois publication that "Lerner's 'reflection' pictures are perhaps the most seductive, as the shore is confined to the top eighth of a vertical canvas and fractured beneath in a mirror of eddies that testifies to the very keenest powers of observation."