Monday, November 8, 2021 – FROM THE 1930’S HIS ART EVOLVED
PENNIES FOR PRESERVATION
BRING YOUR PENNIES, NICKELS DIMES AND QUARTERS TO OUR TABLE AT THE FARMER’S MARKET NEXT SATURDAY
THE PENNIES WILL BE SUPPORTING THE R.I.H.S. AND HELP RE-CIRCULATE COINS.
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2021
The 514th Edition
GREGORIO PRESTPINO
ARTIST
1930’s to 1970’s
Gregorio Prestopino/001 Dominus Vobiscum 1936 oil on canvas 27×40.jpg
| Gregorio Prestopino (1907 – 1984) “I knew at twelve that I was going to be an artist and that there was no other way I could conceive of having a life.”Known during the 1930’s and 1940’s as a social realist*, Gregorio Prestopino, or “Presto” as he was called by friends, spent the last several decades of his career creating a joyous, enchanted world of sunlit landscapes populated by vibrantly colored nymphs. Though these paintings were related to his previous work in their adherence to a painterly style with strong graphic underpinnings, to many observers they were such a radical departure that they appeared to have been produced by an entirely different, and much younger, artist. Prestopino’s friends Rosellen Brown and Marvin Hoffman wrote, “looking at the dark and angry early paintings, it feels as though Presto has lived his life backward, from disillusionment to joy.”Born on New York’s Lower East Side in 1907, Prestopino showed early promise and, at the age of fourteen, was awarded a scholarship to the National Academy of Design. It was there that he fell under the influence of the Ashcan painters. As a young man, he set up his first studio in Harlem and, for the next thirty years, concentrated on depicting the grit of city life – docks, laborers, vendors, Lower East Side streets and, in the 1950’s, Harlem life.Prestopino received much acclaim during the 1940’s, and was, along with Ben Shahn and Philip Evergood, on the best known of the social realist painters. He won a major award in 1946 from the prestigious Pepsi-Cola competition for this painting, Morning Conference. In 1954, on becoming the Director of the McDowell Colony, Prestopino began spending five months each year in Peterborough, New Hampshire.By the early 1960’s, Russell Lynes observed: “[in Prestopino’s work] the sound of the city… gave way to the sounds of the country, the relentless of bricks and pavement and steel to the happy disorder of dappled things.” Prestopino continued painting the sylvan world until his death in 1984.Prestopino’s influence as a teacher, mostly at the New School for Social Research in New York, has been attested to by such former students as Red Grooms. Prestopino was Painter in Residence at the American Academy in Rome during 1968-69. His work has been widely exhibited and can be found in many major public collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York the Art Institute of Chicago, the Smithsonian Museum and the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., which owns over twenty-five of his works. |
 Gregorio Prestopino/002 Days Work 1940 oil on canvas 44×36.jpg |
 Gregorio Prestopino/005 Bread and the City 1945 oil on canvas 29×36.jpg |
 Gregorio Prestopino/007 Two Men Two Bridges 1947 oil on canvas 26×32.jpg |
 Gregorio Prestopino/008 Men and Images 1948 oil on canvas 26×34.jpg |
 Gregorio Prestopino/010 Spring Garden, Coal Country 1950 oil on canvas 41×34.jpg |
 Gregorio Prestopino/028 Brown Brook 1980 oil on canvas 46×50.jpg |
 Gregorio Prestopino/027 Green Nude with Bluejay 1972 oil on canvas 54×48.jpg |
MONDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY
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WEEKEND PHOTO OF THE DAY
Launching of the Essex Class Carrier Kearsarge CV33, May 1945 – Brooklyn Navy Yard.
ED LITCHER GOT IT!!!!!
SOURCES
GREGORI PRESTOPINO.COM
Text by Judith Berdy
Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS
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Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff
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