Leo Katz is painter, muralist, printmaker, and photographer who was born in Roznau, Czechoslovakia in 1887. His formal training was at the Fine Arts Academy in Vienna and at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts. He later traveled extensively throughout Europe and continued studying, supporting himself with portrait commissions, until receiving a sponsorship to the United States. He immigrated in 1920, settling in New York, where he taught a course on Modern Art at the Metropolitan Museum between 1927 and 1933.
Katz moved to Los Angeles in 1934, taking a position at the Chouinard Art Institute. In the 1930s, he assisted Jose Clemente Orozco with his frescos at Dartmouth College and painted murals at the Chicago World’s Fair and the Frank Wiggins Trade School in Los Angeles. He relocated to New York in the 1940s where he worked at Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17 at the New School for Social Research. He then served as director at Atelier 17 when Hayter returned to France in 1950. Katz has a lengthy exhibition history and is represented in collections across the United States.
