Robert Leader: the painting professor

1924 – 2006 · Notre Dame art faculty from 1953

Robert A. Leader (1924–2006): the painter who carried Notre Dame's art teaching through the postwar decades. Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on May 26, 1924, he interrupted his studies at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, to serve in the Marines; as a twenty-year-old corporal he was a member of the patrol that captured Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima and planted an American flag there, and was wounded in the invasion days later. He came home to degrees in art from Yale University and the University of Illinois, taught two years at Clarke College in Dubuque, Iowa, and joined Notre Dame's faculty in 1953, carrying a heavy teaching load and becoming one of the university's most celebrated instructors — his students once gave him a sustained standing ovation at the end of a crowded Washington Hall lecture on Gothic cathedral architecture. His specialty, as scholar and craftsman, was stained glass: his windows stand in St. Matthew's Cathedral in South Bend and in the chapel of Notre Dame's Sorin Hall. "It is hardly an academic task to teach young people to capture the sound and sight of God in any media," he said of teaching liturgical art. "It is like wrestling a thunderbolt in an attempt to nail it to the wall of a church." He died in April 2006, aged eighty-one, professor emeritus of art, art history and design.

Sources:

1. Notre Dame News, "Robert Leader, Notre Dame artist and teacher, dies" (April 2006) — the 1924 Cambridge birth, the Iwo Jima service and wounding, the Yale and Illinois degrees, the Clarke College years, the 1953 arrival, the celebrated teaching, the stained glass at St. Matthew's Cathedral and Sorin Hall, and the death at eighty-one.
2. University of Notre Dame Archives, "Art Department Bob Leader and Murals in Huddle, 1958" (ArchivesSpace) — Leader's mural work on campus, photographed in 1958.