Mol died Saturday at a long-term care facility in Winnipeg and in recent years had been suffering from Alzheimer's disease.
Longtime friend and art dealer David Loch said Monday that Mol's condition had deteriorated to the point where he didn't recognize his own work or his family.
"He's been out of it for quite some time so it's a blessing at the end of the day that it's finally over for Leo," Loch said from the Loch Gallery in Calgary, which also has branches in Winnipeg and Toronto.
"Very sad thing. But he was a wonderful man. He was my first artist back in 1972 when I opened the (Winnipeg) gallery."
Loch, who along with businessman Hartley Richardson spearheaded the creation of the Leo Mol Sculpture Garden in Winnipeg's Assiniboine Park roughly 20 years ago, lauded the prolific Mol as a master of portraiture, noting that the man avoided working from photographs to capture as much realism as possible.
"Leo always (sculpted) from life and in doing that, then captured the character of the individual. A lot of portraits you see they're so stiff, they just leave me stone cold - they're not even a likeness, really, but how do you get the character to come out in a piece of sculpture?" said Loch.
"But you can do that if you're with somebody for a week or two weeks while you're observing just who these individuals are and what type of individuals are they. So Leo's gift in that regard, with portrait sculpture, was immense."
Manitoba's Culture Minister Eric Robinson called Mol one of the province's "brightest stars."
"Through his work, he gave the Manitoba art world a gift that will enrich our province for generations," Robinson said in a release.
"He was a world-class artist living in our midst."
Mol's work included paintings, drawings, porcelain figurines and stained glass windows but he was best known for his bronze sculpture.
They included lifelike interpretations of world leaders such as Queen Elizabeth II and Winston Churchill, both located in the Winnipeg sculpture garden, John Diefenbaker on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, and three popes in Vatican museums.
In 2002, his sculpture Lumberjacks was featured on a Canadian stamp.
The sculpture garden features roughly 300 works including bronze casts of people and animals outdoors, and oil paintings and pastels in an indoor gallery.
Renowned artist Ivan Eyre noted that when he first came to Winnipeg as a student in 1953, Mol was "already well on his way to establishing himself as a vigorous force in the field of sculpture."
"As an art student I was appreciative of Leo's knowledge of the human figure and impressed that as a pioneer he brought the knowledge of bronze casting to Manitoba," said Eyre, a sculptor and painter whose own diverse work has been shown around the world.
"It was clear that he had been well-schooled in the craft in Europe."
Born Leonid Molodozhanyn in 1915 in Ukraine, Mol studied art in Leningrad from 1936 to 1940, and later continued his studies in the Netherlands in 1943. He fled war-ravaged Europe for good several years later, moving to Winnipeg in the late 1940s with his wife, Magareth.
"Canada was a place where at last Leo felt safe. And Canada was forever then his home," Loch said.
"The foundry in Germany where he worked so closely for all those years, Leo told me one day they had said to him, 'Don't go back to Canada just stay here, we can get you all the commissions that you would ever need, you would never have to look for work.' And Leo said, 'No, Canada's my home.' And his home in Canada was Winnipeg."
Loch described Mol - who was appointed an officer of the Order of Canada in 1989 and received the Order of Manitoba in 2000 - as a man of great humility, noting he at times spent hours discussing his work with clients.
"Leo was never a materialistic man, he was never interested in money. He was only interested in his work," said Loch.
"The amazing thing for me was always he was able to achieve all that out of Winnipeg, which again just speaks volumes of the man himself because it's not the easiest city to maybe do it out of, considering he was doing world-class figures."
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