Mel Leipzig, an acclaimed figurative painter whose passion for detail transformed depictions of fellow New Jerseyans in mundane settings into mesmerizing enigmas, died on Nov. 1 in Princeton, N.J. He was 90.
Mr. Leipzig (pronounced LIPE-zug), who long resided in Trenton, died in a nursing home, said his daughter, Francesca Leipzig Picone.
The New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote in 1979 that Mr. Leipzig’s “sense of mysterious emotional tensions in strongly characterized ordinary people makes him, perhaps, the Chekhov of Trenton” — referring to the Russian dramatist who revealed the melancholy interior lives of his subjects.
In contrast to many contemporaries working in abstraction or Minimalism, Mr. Leipzig was so devoted to verisimilitude, he said in an interview with the Painting Perceptions blog, that his favorite of his works was a 1996 acrylic on canvas view of his son, Joshua, sitting insouciantly in a bedroom festooned with graffiti and dirty laundry while three musician friends sprawl on the floor.
Mr. Leipzig never painted from photographs. Instead, he recruited models from among his relatives, neighbors and colleagues. During an early stint in Paris, he offered spaghetti dinners to persuade students to pose, and also used student models when he taught at Mercer County Community College near Trenton — where, as a professor of fine art and art history, he mentored generations from 1968 until he retired in 2013.
“As he grew older and stopped driving, Mel’s subjects came to his home to pose, which only further stirred his artistic creativity as he placed his models in often imagined environments,” Gallery Henoch in Manhattan, which had represented him since 1983, said in a statement.
“Later,” the gallery added, “when he injured his right arm, Mel taught himself to paint with his left, believing that art was in his mind, not in his hand. He would overcome any obstacle life threw at him in order to paint.”
In his work, he was known for hallowing the otherwise unheralded landmarks of New Jersey’s capital city, where he moved in 1970, and for what Dan Bischoff, an art critic with The Star-Ledger, called “an almost hallucinogenic intensity of detail.”
In 2000, an anonymous reviewer for The New Yorker summarized Mr. Leipzig’s Gallery Henoch exhibition: “The fish-eye perspective and the habit of making subjects appear fleshy and unprepossessing recall Lucian Freud, but Leipzig’s profusion of messy detail — the stacks of files and stuffed U-Haul boxes in ‘Lou’ or the catalog of bedroom graffiti in ‘Joshua’s Tattoos’ — are miles from Freud’s dissecting-table approach.”
To Painting Perceptions, Mr. Leipzig said his art had to feature a person “no matter what the painting is about.”
“The main thing that interests me is not just the figure,” he added. “It’s the way the figure related to the background. That has led me to what might be called environmental portraits. It’s mainly the composition of the painting that really excites me, but I must have a person. It’s an essential part of my being.”
Melvin Donald Leipzig was born on May 23, 1935, in Brooklyn, the elder of two children. His father, Irving, an immigrant from Poland, owned a fruit stand. His mother, Anne (Buchsbaum) Leipzig, oversaw the home.
His daughter said he had known he wanted to be an artist since he was 5. While he was attending James Madison High School in Brooklyn, he won a scholarship to study on Saturdays at the Museum of Modern Art, where he recalled being taught about symbolism.
He earned a three-year certificate at the Cooper Union in Manhattan in 1956, a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Yale University’s old School of Art and Architecture in 1958 and a Master of Fine Arts from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 1972.
In 1968, he married Mary Jo Michelessi, an artist; she died in 2007, 18 years to the day before her husband. In addition to his daughter, he is survived by his son and five grandchildren.
Among the institutions that hold Mr. Leipzig’s works are the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Academy of Design, the New Jersey State Museum and the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.
At the end of the Cold War, Mr. Leipzig helped organize an exchange program between New Jersey and Soviet artists, and he was one of seven painters included in the book “Selected Contemporary American Figurative Painters” (2010), published in China.
“Painting has saved my life,” he said in the Painting Perception interview in 2018. “There’s so much in this life that you cannot control. I lost my wife, it was very hard for me but, because I paint, I could get through it. Painting is unbelievable in how it can help.”
“Creativity is very life-giving,” Mr. Leipzig added. “Van Gogh would have shot himself a lot earlier had he not been an artist.”
Sam Roberts is an obituaries reporter for The Times, writing mini-biographies about the lives of remarkable people.
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