If you look closely, your matador ‘painting’ is signed “Lee Burr” at the bottom left, which is ostensibly “Lee Reynolds Burr” of Los Angeles (1936 – 2017). It was likely produced in the very late 1960s or early 1970’s but it’s not an original work. Burr was Chairman of the East Park Gallery in LA for some years and also a director of Vanguard Studios founded in Beverley Hills in Los Angeles in 1964, based at Artisan House. Between them, these establishments churned out more works with a single artist’s ’signature’ than for any other artist in known history. Vanguard was also the world’s largest distributor of decorative art at the time. Burr himself painted almost none of the work.
Burr clarified in his later years that, although he had produced (no more than) 200 original paintings and sculptures, both East Park and Vanguard employed student artists to churn out derivative copies of these works as “sofa art”, using truncated versions of his name as Lee Reynolds, Lee Burr, and also the spurious names Stuart and Van Gaard. The duplicates were often done using a base background layer of acrylics, with line-work from the master original applied using a silkscreen technique. Details were then added to the screened lines to create a raised effect and the finished product sprayed with an oil sealant to create the impression of an original oil painting.
According to Burr, he was responsible for many of the designs, prototypes and compositions used as masters, but the works sold by Vanguard were the product of studio artists and sold only as ‘decorative art’, not ‘collector art’. Nothing signed “Lee Burr” and done at Vanguard Studios, ever touched his hand. Paintings signed “Lee Burr” and done at East Park Gallery only rarely touched his hand. He said that almost all of them were produced by his assistant at the time: Rudolpho Carlos, in response to commissions from art dealers. Almost any size and colouration you wanted, as interpretations of an example work executed entirely by Burr himself. Only a very few of these examples from East Park painted by him and with a “Lee Burr” signature ever reached the market, largely because they had accumulated stray paint spatters over the years while they were being copied and were mostly unsaleable.
At the time, those (very rare) examples were referred to as “series originals” and sold for about $1,000-$2,000, versus two or three digit prices for the duplicates. Yours will be one of the cheaper imitation oil paintings from a Vanguard studio worker.
In later years, to eliminate confusion, Burr signed all of his originals with his full name “Lee Reynolds Burr” and then later still added a thumb print alongside the signature.
