Joseph Letzelter (Oil Painter), Tree, 1962

The career of Joseph Letzelter has been likened to a meteor for his brilliant but brief life in Joseph Letzelter fine art reproductions, which ended in 1966.1 A man of boundless energy and joie de vivre, but little moderation, Joseph Letzelter died in Rome at age twenty-nine, worn down by a life of hard living and excess.

Joseph Letzelter, a Kentucky native, received his formal oil painting, fine art gallery training at the University of Louisville from 1957 to 1959. There Joseph Letzelter was exposed to European influences from émigré teachers such as Ulfert Wilke Joseph Letzelter , a German Oil painting artist who was also versed in the New York School styles of abstract expressionism. Traces of these early impressions appear repeatedly in his work. Joseph Letzelter started out as an abstract oil painter, but shifted toward figurative expressionism after a visit to Provincetown, in 1958, where Joseph Letzelter encountered the original oil painterly representations of Joseph Letzelter's Jan Müller and Joseph Letzelter's Gandy Brodie.

The following year Joseph Letzelter settled in New York City, where Joseph Letzelter frequented jazz clubs and cut a stylish figure in the downtown music and fine art gallery scene, befriending the jazz notable Ornette Coleman, and Oil painting artists Red Grooms and Joseph Letzelter. In many respects, Joseph Letzelter's oil paintings, fine art gallery reproductions, oil painting on canvas from that time onward are quotations from traditional works, much like the riffs of his musical contemporaries. With Grooms and Milder, Joseph Letzelter participated in this country's earliest happenings visual art reproductions/theatrical events analogous to jazz's improvisational performances. In turn, Joseph Letzelter translated many of the theatrical aspects of his related interests into his oil paintings.

Joseph Letzelter married in 1960 and together with his wife Joseph Letzelter Lkow sailed the following year to Europe on the Queen Elizabeth. Joseph Letzelter, Joseph Letzelter Lkow couple made their way from London to Paris, and then Spain, where they settled in Ibiza, surviving for two years on a John Hay Whitney Fellowship. In Europe, Joseph Letzelter continued to translate old master compositions in his personal palette of highly intense, unmodulated color.