Noel Quinn; Santa Anita Portfolio Artist

Noel J. Quinn, internationally known Los Angeles artist whose works include the Santa Anita Portfolio, a series of six racing sketches that hang in the Los Angeles Turf Club at Santa Anita Park, has died. He was 77.

Quinn died Wednesday in a Highland Park nursing home after a series of strokes, the final one on May 1, his daughter, Erin, said.

“After death--art” were the painter’s final words to his family when he emerged briefly from a coma Monday, his daughter said.

Quinn’s commissioned paintings also hang in the Pentagon, the Library of Congress and the U.S. Capitol in Washington. His work has been exhibited in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and in galleries in New York, Los Angeles and Tokyo.

“I feel the color. Color is a sensation,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1973 while discussing the Santa Anita Portfolio, which he created in 1960. “You don’t really see it. Only experience allows us to do that.”

Earning his given name, the French word for Christmas , Quinn was born on Christmas Day in 1915 in Pawtucket, R.I. He studied art at the Rhode Island School of Design and won a fellowship for post-graduate study in Paris.

In Paris during the pre-World War II 1930s, Quinn became the protege of the cultural “Lost Generation,” including artist Pablo Picasso; writers Gertrude Stein, James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway, and dancer Isadora Duncan and her brother, Raymond, in whose academy Quinn set up his studio. Visiting a German exchange student in Berlin whom he had met at college in Rhode Island, Quinn was sought out by Adolf Hitler, a friend of his German hosts.

Hitler, who fancied himself an artist, had been rejected by the Royal Academy in Vienna and wanted Quinn’s opinion of his watercolors.

“They were like large postcards,” Quinn told The Times in 1988. “He was a reporter rather than an artist. You know what a reporter is . . . one who doesn’t see beyond what a photograph reveals. You have to take what you see and say something about it.”

Quinn taught from 1953 to 1975 at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles.

In addition to daughter Erin, he is survived by his wife of 41 years, Helen, and four children, Brian, Tara, Terence and Sheila, and seven grandchildren. A son, Noel Patrick, preceded him in death.

A memorial Mass is scheduled for 6:30 p.m. Tuesday at St. Anne’s Chapel, 155 N. Occidental Blvd.

The family has asked that any memorial contributions be made to the Rhode Island School of Design or Otis-Parsons Art Institute for scholarships.