John Talleur

John Talleur (1925-2001) was an American artist, printmaker, and art educator at Kansas University. 

John Talleur was born as John Joseph Talleur in 1925 in Chicago, Illinois. He received a bachelor's degree in fine arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1947. In 1951, he earned a master's degree in fine arts from the University of Iowa, where he studied under celebrated Argentine printmaker Mauricio Lasansky. He received a Fulbright Fellowship in 1953 for study in France. 

Also in 1953, Talleur accepted a teaching job at the Kansas University in Lawrence, Kansas. He taught at KU for more than 40 years before retiring in 1996. He pioneered the school's printmaking program.

Talleur was an avid art collector—his first purchase was a Pablo Picasso artwork that he bought in 1952 as a gift for a girlfriend. His collection grew over the years and included works by such influential artists as Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Francisco de Goya, Max Beckmann, Felix Buhot, Mary Cassatt, Eric Fischl, Käthe Kollwitz, Auguste-Louis Lepère, Charles Meryon, and Pierre Bonnard.

Several years before his death in 2001, Talleur donated six of his personal presses to the Lawrence Arts Center, where they now form the core of the center's first-ever printmaking studio. He also left his extensive collection of prints to Kansas University's Spencer Museum of Art.