Leo Kenney

Leo Kenney (1925–2001) was an American abstract painter, described by critics as a leading figure in the second generation of the 'Northwest School' of artists.

Kenney was born in Spokane, Washington on March 5, 1925, and moved to Seattle with his family at age six. He was interested in art from a young age, copying pictures from newspapers and art magazines. He had an early love of surrealism, and did very well in art classes. Although an intensely energetic kid, he had health problems related to his small stature. At one point in his teenage years he suffered a case of mumps so serious that he had to spend several weeks in bed, his weight dropping to 70 pounds.

He attended Broadway High School, on Seattle's Capitol Hill. An art teacher, Jule Kullberg, sent him to see the works of Mark Tobey and Morris Graves at the Seattle Art Museum. "I was never so knocked out as when I first saw Graves' Morning Star and In the Night," Kenney recalled in a 1999 interview. "It was an epiphany to come upon his work - the originality of it."

Kenney was dumbfounded when, following the attack on Pearl Harbor and the beginning of American involvement in World War Two, his Japanese friends from Broadway High were removed from school for shipment to internment camps. "It was the awakening of my social consciousness," he later recalled.

In 1942 Kenney's older brother Jack was drafted into the U.S. Army; shortly after that, his father died. An average student at best, he dropped out of high school on his 18th birthday. He was promptly called up by the draft, but, being underweight, was rejected. He went to work at the Douglas Aircraft assembly plant in Long Beach, California.

Kenney returned to Seattle in 1944. After his mother remarried and moved to Long Beach, he moved in with the family of a friend, Jack Griffin. He routinely painted through the night in the basement room he shared with Griffin, who was so impressed with Kenney's work that he took some of his paintings to the Frederick & Nelson's department store in downtown Seattle, which had a small art gallery. Kenney's first exhibition, along with sculptor James W. Washington, Jr., took place there in 1944. The gallery manager then brought Kenney's work to the attention of Dr. Richard Fuller, the director of the Seattle Art Museum, which bought its first Kenney painting, The Inception of Magic, in 1945. The artist was just 20 years old.

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