Leonard Nelson is a painter and sculptor. He is best known as an abstract painter, whose work evolved from gestural abstraction to a luminous color field aesthetic inspired by the landscape, but he also produced prints and sculptures. Born and raised in Camden, New Jersey, Nelson attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and took classes at the Barnes Foundation. He served in the Army during World War II. After the war he exhibited widely in New York and Philadelphia, becoming associated with the Betty Parsons Gallery, Peggy Guggenheim's Art of this Century, and the New York School of abstract expressionist painters. By the early 1950s he had returned to Philadelphia and was teaching at the Moore College of Art, and he remained in the Philadelphia area for the rest of his life.
