Ernst van Leyden was born in Rotterdam in 1892. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts with further training in Brussels, Berlin, and London, before embarking on a life of extraordinary cosmopolitan breadth. With studios at various times in Los Angeles, Venice, and Paris, he moved freely between continents and cultures, counting among his friends and acquaintances some of the defining figures of twentieth-century culture — among them Charlie Chaplin, Igor Stravinsky, and Bertolt Brecht.
His early work was rooted in Expressionism, but in 1948 he made his first abstract works and never looked back. By the 1950s he was producing large-scale collages that placed him in close dialogue with the experiments of Jasper Johns and Rauschenberg — works that probed the nature of materials themselves, finding in texture, surface, and found elements a language of considerable power and originality.
His print Emaciated Owl III, produced in collaboration with Fred Genis, is a haunting and distinctive work — a mask-like owl face rendered in blue, its circular eyes and radiating lines combining the totemic and the geometric with quiet intensity. The work suggests a broader Emaciated Owl series, of which this is the third. Whether further prints from the series exist in the collection is worth investigating.
Ernst van Leyden died in Paris in 1969. His work is held in major collections worldwide.
