Lucille Wallenrod

Lucille Wallenrod (1918–1998) was a Long Island woman artist who was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Freeport, Long Island. She studied at the W.P.A. Art Class (1939), Nassau Art League (1940), the American Artists School (1942), and with Sol Wilson at the Art Students League of New York (1943). She had her first solo exhibition at the Roko Gallery (1946) and then belonged for many years to the Charles Barzansky Gallery, both in New York City. She also participated in numerous group exhibitions in the late forties until the early nineteen sixties.

Lucille Wallenrod was handicapped from birth with Cerebral Palsy and she painted with a special arm brace of her own design. She painted dramatic expressionist seascapes, with broad strokes and deep vivid colours, and still lifes and portraits as well.

She won a number of competitions, most notably the first prize in the National Art Contest sponored by the then President Eisenhower’s Committee on the Handicapped in 1956. Judges for this competition were Isabel Bishop and Andrew Wyeth. Her work was often reviewed in New York and Long Island newspapers.

Due to a long terminal illness, Lucille Wallenrod’s output waned in her later years, yet her interest and sensitivity for the arts never faltered. She died in Ridge, New York in 1998. Her husband, Gerald Dreyblatt, died in Florida in 2008. She is survived by her son, Arnold Dreyblatt, who is a composer and media artist living in Berlin, Germany.