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In the Meridian of the Heart - SAVE 50%!

In the Meridian of the Heart - SAVE 50%!

Selected Letters of Rico Lebrun

Edited by James Renner, David Lebrun

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Godine

Hardcover
ISBN: 978-1-56792-112-0
Pages: 112
Size: 7.58" x 10.32"
Published: July 2001
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Rico Lebrun was a maverick, an artist of deep humanity and broad sympathies. A draftsman, painter, and sculptor of great accomplishment and international recognition, he constantly sought to transform his natural virtuosity into something deeper and more elemental. His life was devoted to the monumental (and transparently impossible) purpose of accurately mapping the terra incognita of the human form and human heart.

These letters written between 1950 and 1964, as he moved between the United States, Mexico, and Italy, give the reader an intimate and extended glance into the impassioned crucible of his mind and soul. Lebrun belonged to a generation to which art was, and had to be, something more than abstract compositions or cerebral exercises. For him, art was a force, a profoundly moral force, that could construct and shape an edifice containing all the inconsistency, drama, and inner conflict of the human animal, from its capacity for cruelty, its proclivity for war and its indifference to the nuclear threat to its sublime moments of grace.

His letters are tender, outspoken, humorous, and often perplexed. Selected and edited by James Renner and the artist's son, David Lebrun, they address the forging of a new visual language and comfort friends in crisis; they are bursting with life, demonstrative of fierce love, filled with wisdom and mercilessly articulate. This is in every sense an artist's book, one illustrated with the best of his prolific work and adorned by a prose that is poetic, engaged, and infused with an earnest, almost naive, devotion to the potential of the human spirit.

James Renner
James Renner was born in Ohio and educated at Kent State University. After graduating, he worked as a journalist for Cleveland Scene and as an editor for the alternative newspaper The Cleveland Independent. As a journalist, he investigated several sensational cases, including the murder of ten-year-old Amy Mihaljevic and the disappearance of nursing student Maura Murray. He also interviewed the reclusive author J. D. Salinger. In 2005, Cleveland Magazine, named Renner was named "one of the city's 30 most interesting people."

David Lebrun
David Lebrun, son of Rico Lebrun, is a filmmaker with wide-ranging talents. He has served as producer, director, writer, cinematographer, animator and/or editor of more than sixty films. In addition to his work as a filmmaker, Lebrun has taught film production and editing at the California Institute of the Arts and curated numerous art exhibitions. Since 1996 he has been president of Night Fire Films, a documentary film production company.