LeRoy Turner (1905 - 1957)

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R. Leroy Turner is known for his vibrant Modern abstractions that were completed from the late 1920s through the early 1950s.  His artwork emphasizes a lyrical form of Cubism, often inspired by visual interpretations of classical music.  Many of his compositions are titled after specific pieces of music, and frequently they include themes of melodic symbols, devices, and musical scores.

Born in Sherwood, ND in 1905, Turner spent much of his childhood in Minnesota.  In Minneapolis, LeRoy Turner studied painting at the University of Minnesota with artists Cameron Booth and Edmund Kinzinger.  He was highly influenced by the artwork of Picasso, Braque, Juan Gris, and Klee.  In 1928 he traveled to Europe to further his art studies in Munich and Paris. There he continued his association with instructors Booth and Kinzinger. 

Returning to the United States, Turner joined the faculty of the St. Paul School of Art in St Paul, MN, where he became a painting instructor from 1933 to 1936.  In 1935, to favored reviews, Turner exhibited his abstract paintings at a one-man show at the Nash Conley Galleries in Minneapolis.

In 1936, Turner and fellow artist Alexander Corazzo joined the prestigious avant-garde European painting group Abstraction Création. This influential organization of painters and sculptors included Piet Mondrian, Jean Arp, and Albert Gleizes, among others, and promoted the aesthetic concepts of geometric abstract painting.  Their emphasis was a painting style of formal purity, line, color, and non-objectivity. Turner and Corrazo were two of a very selected few American artists accepted into the group, which also included Alexander Calder and Robert Carl Holty.  Turner exhibited two paintings with Abstraction-Création in 1936, which he showed under the name "Leroy".

Leroy Turner suffered from chronic poor health. While many of his colleagues and contemporaries, such as Corazzo and Calder, continued to exhibit and travel extensively, Turner returned to Minneapolis to become a full-time painting instructor.  From 1936-1948 Turner taught at the University of Minnesota. During the years of the Second World War, from 1940-1942, he became an Assistant Director at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.  Later in his life, he was a painting and sculpture instructor at the Stillwater Art Colony from 1938 to 1950. 

Turner died in 1957 in Stillwater, MN at the age of 52.