A life,painted late

Walter Rainer Leonhardt was born in Vienna in 1933 to German parents and grew up in San Remo, on the Italian Riviera. He travelled and lived in many countries over the decades that followed, and the restlessness shows: the archive holds Provence, Paris, Venice, Egypt, New York and the Arizona desert, all of it filtered through the same unmistakable hand.

He began painting at fourteen. He did not begin selling until 1990, at fifty-seven — and then the success was immediate and, by his own account, surprising.

Shortly after he started showing, Léon began the series that would define him. Not the kind of cats you meet on the street: they are an ironic vision of humanity and the animal world in the same body, depicted in unusual colours and stranger poses, every one of them different from the last and therefore unique.

The cats travelled further than he did. Today they are held in museums in Amsterdam, Nice, Lausanne and Ainville, and forty-two of them were published as a catalogue by the Galerie du Marché in Montreux under the title Les chats fantastiques.

His largest work — 350 × 180 cm — hangs in the Belle Étage of the Berlin Hilton. The largest in the estate's own hands is Terra X, 320 × 172 cm of oil built up in layers on hardboard.

Alongside the cats he worked in series: The USA seen by a Martian, The Lovers, Homo Vacuum, Lips, 12 Faces of Eva, and ten satirical works following Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven. Les Solitudes and Walled-in were the last two he began.

Posters were published in Italy, offset lithographs in France, and postcards across Europe and the United States. Galleries in Germany, France, Holland, Switzerland, Austria, Canada and the USA carried his work, several of them showing it at Art Cologne and Art Basel.

Léon left us on 11 October 2013. Many of his works remain visible at his home on Lake Garda, in Bardolino, where the estate is still based.

This archive is the first attempt to put the whole of it in one place — including three series that were named in his own biography but never published in his lifetime.