Melvin Donald “Mel” Leipzig, a painter who guided generations of artists from his adopted home of Trenton, New Jersey, died on November 1 at the age 90. According to his daughter, Francesca Leipzig, he died exactly 18 years after the passing of his wife, the artist Mary Jo Michelessi.
Across more than half a century, the Brooklyn-born artist portrayed the people and places he encountered—no matter how mundane—with radiant selfhood. He never painted from photographs, preferring to practice what he described in past interviews as “designing with reality.”
Working primarily in acrylic on canvas, he rendered his peers, family, and students with feverish realism. He painted artists in their studios, academic peers buried beneath paper and books at their desks, and actors bathed in the spotlight. Writing in the Star-Ledger in 2008, critic Dan Bischoff observed that “everything in a Leipzig is painted with an almost hallucinogenic intensity of detail, just as he sees it.”
The setting that defined Leipzig may have been the classroom. Born in Brooklyn in 1935, he showed an early interest in art education, studying at Cooper Union with modern landscape painter Neil Welliver and later earned his BFA at Yale University under Bauhaus legend Josef Albers. He went on to receive his master’s degree from Pratt Institute and was awarded a Fulbright Grant to study in Paris, where he hitchhiked across Europe to paint—an experience that left an indelible mark on his practice.
From 1968 until his retirement in 2013, he was a professor of fine art and art history at Mercer County Community College, where he was a beloved presence in the visual arts department and a mentor to countless aspiring painters.
During that time, he founded the Trenton Artist Workshop Association (TAWA), based at the Trenton City Museum, in 1979—though in a 2023 note written for TAWA’s 45th anniversary, he credited Mary Howard and Latta Patterson with the idea for the organization. Over those 45 years, he built TAWA into a vital catalyst for regional talent, staging exhibitions in collaboration with the Trenton City Museum and other venues. He also helped organize the 1989–90 TAWA–Soviet Exchange, a program that sent New Jersey artists to Moscow and brought Soviet artists to Trenton.
New York’s Gallery Henoch, which represented the artist since 1983, said in a statement: “As he grew older and stopped driving, Mel’s subjects came to his home to pose, which only further stirred his artistic creativity as he placed his models in often imagined environments. Later, when he injured his right arm, Mel taught himself to paint with his left, believing that art was in his mind, not in his hand. He would overcome any obstacle life threw at him in order to paint.”
Leipzig’s paintings are owned by cultural institutions nationwide, including the Whitney Museum, the National Academy Museum, and the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York. In New Jersey, his works are in the collection of the New Jersey State Museum; Jersey City Museum; the Montclair Art Museum; the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Museum at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, among others. His work was the subject of retrospectives at the New Jersey State Museum and the Rider University Art Gallery. Earlier this month, the Trenton City Museum opened “A Community Celebrates an Icon: Mel Leipzig at 90,” a citywide exhibitions series celebrating his oeuvre.
To the end, he never stopped painting, saying once, “Work can help you get through a lot of heartache and troubling times. Being an artist and a teacher is very life-giving.” He completed his final canvases at the age of 90, work that maintained the striking intimacy praised by art critic Peter Schjeldahl, who wrote in 1979 that Leipzig’s “sense of mysterious emotional tensions in strongly characterized ordinary people makes him perhaps, the Chekhov of Trenton.”
Leipzig is survived by his daughter and son-in-law, Francesca and Louis Picone; his son and daughter-in-law, Joshua and Martha Leipzig (née Schultz); grandchildren Vincent and Leonardo Picone, and Rayona, Zev, and Ami Leipzig; his niece, Nicole Sage; and her daughter, Georgia Leipzig Kayes.
