I’m very sorry to report this, but Dr. Robert Leader, emeritus professor of art and my father’s mentor, has died. I remember, every Sunday, looking up at his Stations of the Cross mural painted along the entire expanse of the South wall of Little Flower Catholic Church. His specialty was stained glass windows and the mural evoked the same feeling as stained glass. Dr. Leader’s influence on my father’s style is obvious and though I had the opportunity to meet Dr. Leader a few times when I was in school, I never had the chance to thank him for that. Here is a reprint of Dr. Leader’s obituary for when the link to the South Bend Tribune goes away:
Robert A. Leader, a professor emeritus of art, art history and design at the University of Notre Dame, died Tuesday in South Bend.
He was 81 years old.
One of Leader’s specialties, both as a scholar and a craftsman, was stained glass. His work in stained glass includes windows in Saint Matthew’s Cathedral in South Bend and in the chapel of Sorin Hall at Notre Dame.
He also designed stained-glass windows for churches in Dubuque, Iowa, and Northfield and Rochester, Minn., and murals for Little Flower Catholic Church in South Bend.Born May 26, 1924, in Cambridge, Mass., Leader interrupted his studies at the Museum of Fine Art in Boston to serve in the Marines during World War II.
As a 20-year-old corporal, he was wounded during the invasion of Iwo Jima a few days after having been a member of the patrol that captured Mount Suribachi and famously planted an American flag there.
Leader was not in the well-known photo of the flag raising.
He was just below the summit sealing off caves where Japanese snipers were entrenched, according to a 1953 Tribune article.
Within minutes after the summit was secured, a priest serving as a Marine chaplain celebrated Mass there, Leader said. “Very few people realize that the blessed sacrament rested atop Mount Suribachi almost simultaneously with the American flag,” the artist told a reporter.
He wrote years later that on the morning of the Suribachi assault, he was startled at the infernal ugliness of a military objective which “only that morning I had thought looked beautiful, like the woodcut prints of (Japanese artists) Hiroshige and Utamaro.”
Leader returned from the war to obtain degrees in art from Yale University and the University of Illinois. On Sept. 1, 1949, he married Dorothy Riehl of Raleigh, N.D., who survives.
Leader taught for two years at Clarke College in Dubuque, Iowa, before joining the Notre Dame faculty in 1953.
He retired from teaching in 1989.
He received Notre Dame’s outstanding service award of the U.S. Air Force in 1976.
Leader once said of the attempt to teach liturgical art craft: “It is hardly an academic task to teach young people to capture the sound and sight of God in any media. It is like wrestling a thunderbolt in an attempt to nail it to the wall of a church. There are few who can survive such an arduous task.”