After graduating, Lerner won a foreign travel fellowship (1952)Art Institute of Chicago, 1952 Press Releases, June 9, 1952. Retrieved April 7, 2018. and a Fulbright grant (1957), which took him for a year to Rome and to Florence, respectively. The experience left an enduring mark; his studies of Renaissance and Baroque art, as well as classical literature like Dante, took his developing work in figurative, mythological and mystical directions, while solidifying his classically influenced aesthetics. Travel would exert a strong influence throughout his career, inspiring a decade-plus shift to landscape painting in the late 1970s, and a return to the figure in the mid-1990s.
