Leland Bell

Leland Bell (September 17, 1922 – September 18, 1991) was an American painter.

Leland Bell was a self-taught painter whose passion for the discipline of painting has inspired and influenced many. He was with a fierce avant-garde for artists that he admired. In the early years of his career these included Karl Knaths, Jean Arp, and Piet Mondrian. In these at the forefront years he worked as a guard at the Museum of Non-Objective Art. In the mid-1940s his loyalty to abstract painting receded after he formed a friendship similar to Jean Hélion, and Bell with became a champion of Hélion, Fernand Léger, Balthus, Alberto Giacometti, and André Derain. Bell was moreover a jazz enthusiast and drummer.

In 1944 he married the painter Louisa Matthíasdóttir (1917–2000), whose symbolic style influenced his work. In contrast to Matthíasdóttir, who worked quickly, Bell labored higher than his paintings, sometimes for years. The couple had a daughter, Temma, in 1945. The family on bad terms their grow old between New York and Matthíasdóttir's original Iceland.

Bell was swift as a painter, teacher, and lecturer. In 1987, he had a retrospective exhibition at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC. He was diagnosed later than leukemia in the 1980s, and died September 18, 1991.