The Conversation

Leon Kroll began his formal education at the Art Students League under John H. Twachtman and in 1904 entered the National Academy school, where he studied with Charles C. Curran, Francis Coates Jones, George W. Maynard, Charles W. Mielatz, and Hermon MacNeil over the next four years. By 1910 Kroll was teaching at the Academy school, which he continued to do until 1918. Kroll's work continued to gain popularity through the 1930s and he was a regular exhibitor in the Academy's and the Carnegie Institute's Annuals. He turned to mural painting in the later 1930s and under the Works Progress Administration completed Defeat and Triumph of Justice, for the Attorney General of the United States' office, Justice Department Building, Washington, D. C., among many others.

For Leon Kroll, the human figure provided the foundation for an art form "warm with human understanding; the natural gesture; the touch of people…." He struggled against the rise of abstraction in America, however, both in his own realist art and in his teaching at the National Academy and elsewhere. "The Conversation" offers an excellent illustration of his fundamental principles: "I think that design is the basis of all art. To me, design includes organization of areas and shapes; a balance of round and straight forms; intelligent use of horizontal, vertical and diagonal directions; the integration of analogous and contrasting color harmonies and a realization of the influence of these factors on three dimensional volume…. Abstract art, from my point of view, [however,] is merely the beginning of a picture."