Julian Lethbridge (born 1947) is a British Ceylon-born, US-based, British abstract painter and drawer.[1][2] His work is in permanent collections of museums in North America and Europe.
Julian Lethbridge was born in 1947 in Colombo, British Ceylon.[3][2] He grew up in England.[2]
Lethbridge was educated at Winchester College, where he was a boarder from 1960 to 1966.[2] He enrolled at the University of Cambridge in 1966, graduating in 1969.[2]
Lethbridge was a banker from 1969 to 1972, when he moved to New York City to embark upon a career as a painter and drawer.[2] Through his relationship with the American artist Jennifer Bartlett, he met Jasper Johns, who "became a kind of mentor" to him, and due to their closeness, many incorrectly assumed that they were lovers.[4]
By 1988, his work was exhibited at the Julian Pretto Gallery, and he was the recipient of the Francis J. Greenburger Award.[2] A year later, in 1989, his work was exhibited at the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York and the Daniel Weinberg Gallery in San Francisco.[2]
His work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,[5][6][3] the Whitney Museum of American Art,[7] the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.,[2] the Art Institute of Chicago,[8] and the Tate Britain in London.[9][10]
In the 1970s, he had a relationship with the American artist Jennifer Bartlett, nine years his senior.[4] After Bartlett left him, he had relationships with the photographer Mary Ellen Mark, the feminist Germaine Greer, and the French novelist Katherine Pancol.[4]
Lethbridge lives in Manhattan and Connecticut and with until her death in 2020 Anne Hendricks Bass. They were together from the mid-1990s until 2020.[4]
They were taken hostage on her Connecticut estate in 2007. Five years later, in 2012, their butler was sentenced to 20 years in prison for attempted extortion.[11]
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