Charles Le Clair, Tyler dean

Charles Le Clair, 92, of Center City, dean of Temple University's Tyler School of Art from 1960 to 1974, and an artist who painted in oils and watercolors nearly his entire life, died of respiratory failure April 2 at Hahnemann University Hospital.

Mr. Le Clair's last one-man show, one of more than 40 throughout his life in this country and Europe, was at Gross McCleaf Gallery in Center City in 2003.

In 1998, he exhibited a 60-year retrospective at Villanova University.

Born in Columbia, Mo., Mr. Le Clair earned a bachelor's degree in 1933 and a master's in 1935, both in art, from the University of Wisconsin. He also did postgraduate studies at Columbia University.

During the decades before coming to Temple in 1960, Mr. Le Clair taught art at the University of Alabama, Buffalo's Albright Art School, and Pittsburgh's Chatham College.

He founded Temple's campus in Rome in 1966, where he taught for nine summers. Mr. Le Clair continued teaching at Temple until he retired in 1981.

Mr. Le Clair's paintings were never identified with any specific art movement.

His art explored man in the city, asserting that cityscapes and related still lifes could express narration. He selected ideas from the old masters. His paintings from the late 1940s and 1950s focused on postwar neighborhood decay in Pittsburgh.

He was well-known for paintings that reflected the civil-rights struggles of the 1960s. During the late 1960s, when he taught in Rome, his paintings showed a city full of history juxtaposed with the irony of advertising posters everywhere.

Mr. Le Clair's printings were displayed at the Art Institute of Chicago; New York's Whitney Museum of American Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Brooklyn Museum; the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington; the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; the Philadelphia Art Alliance; and Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, and were in the permanent collection of the State Museum of Pennsylvania in Harrisburg.

After he retired from Temple, Mr. Le Clair published two books, The Art of Watercolor (Prentice-Hall, 1985), and Color in Contemporary Painting (Watson-Guptill Publications, 1991).

Mr. Le Clair has no immediate survivors. He married Margaret Foster, former dean of Beaver College, now Arcadia University, in 1945. She died in 1991.

A memorial service will be held at 2 p.m. tomorrow at the Church of St. Luke and the Epiphany, 330 S. 13th St., Philadelphia. Burial was private.