The Sword Swallower

Leonard Edmondson

Four years prior to creating “The Sword Swallower” Leonard Edmondson had been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship allowing him to focus on printmaking full time. This led to a prolific period of work in which he combined his early figurative style with his non-representational exploration of the 1950s, forming compositions that seemed to highlight the slightly chaotic within the bounds of simplified, almost formal color fields.

Contrasting with his earthy, layered lithographs depicting surreal desert scenes, “The Sword Swallower” is bold and graphic, and features a rare, nearly mathematical approach: on a velvety black rectangle, white bars like prison bars separate two figures - performers, perhaps. They themselves appear to represent the part of Edmondson that revolts against staid artistic tradition; yet within their boundaries, they themselves are framed like works of art.