Michael Lenson

[1] The Treasury Department's Section of Painting and Sculpture commissioned Lenson to create a mural titled Mining (1942) for the United States post office in Mount Hope, West Virginia.

He paints with some sort of synthetic resins and lacquer and the resulting surfaces, not pleasing to the eye, are as hard and unyielding as the whip-like profilings that imprison his mannered figures.

A good deal of imagination goes into these figures, which move from reality to fantasy with the professional ease of ballet dancers.He painted in oil after 1950, adapting his earlier surrealist elements to the socialist realism of his younger years.

One critic described his later works as "sometimes difficult to read because they're so visually intricate" but are still perfect representatives of the politically engaged art of the Cold War years.

He testified before a government committee in 1969 to urge increased funding for public libraries in a room decorated with his own murals.

TheButler Institute of American Art in Ohio presented a one-man retrospective exhibition of paintings and drawings by Lenson, "Time, Place and Substance", in 2012–2013.

His son is David Lenson, a professor in the Comparative Literature department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the author of On Drugs.