Above: Full view of electric pastel work

A large impressionist pastel by Leon Dolice with an electric view of an illuminated New York City skyline, looking down Madison Avenue towards Chelsea’s Flatiron building. Leon Dolice spent over 60 years painting New York City landscapes, borrowing from the French Impressionists and Claude Monet specifically. He depicted his beloved Manhattan in varying lighting and color combinations, capturing the extreme skyscrapers and machine age industrialism which transformed the New York skyline during the art deco jazz age.

Above: The artist’s signature

Born and raised in Vienna, Leon Dolice rejected his family business and traveled through the major museums of Europe to study the art of the masters. After supporting himself as both an illustrator and stage designer, Dolice left Vienna for America in 1920. Settling in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, he became friends with such contemporary artists as George Luks and Herbert Roth. For the following twenty years, Dolice established his reputation mostly with his favorite medium — the art of etching. After 1940 the decline in popularity of etching forced the artist to turn to painting and pastel drawing.

As an original etcher, Leon Dolice was equally accomplished in both figure studies and views of New York.
Today, institutions that contain examples of Dolice’s etchings in their permanent collections include the Museum of the City of New York, the New York Public Library, Georgetown University and the Print Club of Philadelphia.In the past few years, his work has been exhibited at Hofstra Museum, with the Montauk Artists’ Association, with the New Rochelle Council on The Arts, at Décor Expo and Art Expo at Javits Center and at numerous hotels, galleries and not-for-profit organizations mostly in the greater metropolitan New York area. Replicas of his works are offered in many galleries in New York and California and have been sold at Bloomingdales stores nationwide, and at other retail establishments.

Pastel is matted and framed in a period gesso ornate frame and was in the collection of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester Minnesota.