For a short time in the 1930s, Lechay was a social realist, taking part in exhibitions protesting such injustices as homelessness and racism.
9 While teaching at Iowa, Lechay led summer workshops at various American art schools and at institutions in Hong Kong and Samos, Greece.
[5] In 1959, the builder-architect Hayden Walling, in close consultation with the Lechays, designed and built a summer home and studio for the couple in Wellfleet, MA.
[9] At a time when many of his contemporaries were embracing complete abstraction, James Lechay never abandoned figuration, and retained images and suggestions of: people; cities; seascapes; and various still lives.
[10] Though he acknowledged influences as diverse as Giorgio Morandi, Max Beckmann, Milton Avery, and Henri Matisse, he "...realized early on that the richest source of inspiration and challenge was inside his own persona, which brought about pure, process-driven painting, unhampered by the demons of careerism and trendiness".
According to the museum’s director, James Leach, "Lechay stands out as one of the most significant American artists of an innovative era who has been insensitively overlooked.
"[12] The Provincetown painter Megan Hinton has written that "Lechay’s masterful works are simultaneously expressionistic, impressionistic, abstract, minimal, and realistic.
He executed a confident and expressive painting approach through his entire career, and left us with an array of work that appears timeless and effortless.
In Lechay we see that confidence, and that economy of mark-making.” [14] Others in Trieste, Italy; Dartmouth college; and SUNY Binghamton[15] A retrospective show at the Provincetown Art Association, curated by painter Megan Hinton, opened in July 2017.