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Artists & Works
Allan D’Arcangelo
American (1930-88)
UNTITLED from Homage to Picasso (1973)
screenprint
29.875” x 22"

STYLE: POP ART, HOMAGE TO PICASSO

  

Born in Buffalo, Allan D’Arcangelo attended the University of Buffalo, the City College of New York and the New School for Social Research. He taught at Brooklyn College, the School of Visual Arts in New York City and the Institute of Humanistic Studies in Aspen, Colorado. He has had many public commissions, including murals and posters, notably the poster for the ill-fated 1970 Munich Olympics. He has had many distinguished one-person shows internationally, and is represented in most major collections of modern and contemporary art.

D’Arcangelo is known primarily as associated with the Pop Art movement, but his work moved beyond Pop in the sixties to focus on perspective and depictions of the highway. His works became abstract, distilling his earlier, recognizable images, such as traffic signs, into basic forms. This work from the Homage to Picasso portfolio retains color and other elements that belong to the visual language of transportation and its signage, but it is also an abstract work dealing with perspective. There is no literal connection to Picasso.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

Gyorgy Kepes, Boston Globe, 11/23/00
Allan D'Arcangelo hit his height as a painter during the Pop Art movement of the 1960s. His show at the Beth Urdang Gallery is an unusual opportunity to see this artist's work; D'Arcangelo's estate is holding on to most of it as it prepares for a museum exhibition. D'Arcangelo's vocabulary was the sharp colors and clean shapes of the American highway. Painting in a flat, graphic style that layered sky and earth, asphalt and signage, the artist found a jazzy rhythm and nonstop momentum that fit with the wild, restless innocence and disillusionment of the Beat Generation.
"Proposition No. 3" (1965) starts with a flat blue sky hanging over lime-green grass, with a black asphalt curve snaking up the middle, split by white highway lines. A giant U-turn sign, black on yellow, fills the middle of the painting, bisected, with one half of the diamond slightly lower than the other, making the picture spin.
Buffalo News obituary, 12/22/98
Allan M. D'Arcangelo, 68, a Buffalo-born artist who achieved international renown in the 1960s with his series of minimalist highway paintings, died last Thursday (Dec. 17, 1998) in Beth Israel North Hospital, New York City. The cause was leukemia, his family reported.
Prominent in the first generation of Pop artists as "the artist of the open road," he exhibited widely throughout the U.S. and Europe in the 1960s and 1970s. He had one-man shows at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in 1971 and what was then the Burchfield Center in 1979.
"He began painting the highway about 1963. Always his view was driver-oriented," the late Buffalo News art critic Jean Reeves wrote following the Albright-Knox's acquisition of his monumental 108 by 108-inch "Landscape" in 1969.
"These paintings were as clean and hard-edged as the highways themselves," Ms. Reeves observed. "The artist schematically composed with his images: The isolated ribbon of road stretching toward the horizon, stark traffic signs, relentless, curving white center lines, summarized foliage and somber color schemes. This was not a particular highway, just Highway."
D'Arcangelo came late into his career as an artist. As a student at Technical High School, where he took three years of drafting, he and his friends were encouraged to become lawyers. At the University of Buffalo, he majored in history and government, hung out with a literary crowd and wrote poetry and short stories.
"Even college wasn't for him an easy, straight-to-the-end experience," Reeves wrote in 1971. "After a year at UB, he transferred to Bowling Green University in Ohio, stayed a semester, then quit and hitchhiked around the country.
"He tried for a job as an oil-well 'roughneck,' but wound up instead 'trying to sell encyclopedias in Houston.' He finally hitchhiked back home and re-entered UB, receiving his B.A. degree in 1953."
He went to New York City to pursue his interests in culture, served in the Army Signal Corps in 1954 and 1955, then returned to New York to study writing at the New School and education at City College. He also started visiting art galleries, encountering the Abstract Expressionists.
He enrolled in Mexico City College under the G.I. Bill in 1957 and had his first one-man exhibition in Mexico City the following year.
Back in New York in 1959, he waited on tables in Greenwich Village and started teaching and painting. His style evolved from figurative and political to simple and abstract. Never comfortable with being classified as a Pop artist, he often cited the minimalist de Chirico as an inspiration.
His highway series, featured in his first major one-man show in the Fischbach Gallery in 1963, was a sensation and led to a succession of other exhibitions. He was commissioned to do a mural for the Transportation and Travel Pavilion at the 1964 New York World's Fair.
By the time he exhibited here in 1971, D'Arcangelo had left his highway series behind in favor of even more minimalist paintings which featured construction barriers and other familiar geometric forms.
Later he turned to the industrial images that dominated his "American Landscapes" show at the Burchfield in 1979, then evolved away from realism into more primitive images, reflecting his abiding interest in ancient cultures. He built a 40-foot natural stone sun clock on his 80-acre farm in the Catskills near Kenoza Lake, where he had lived since the early 1970s.
He began a four-year association with the Marlborough Gallery in 1971 and had numerous commissions for murals. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in painting and sculpture in 1987-88. His last one-man shows were in 1991.
Also a teacher, he was an instructor at the School of Visual Arts from 1963 to 1968 and again from 1983 to 1989. He was an art professor at Brooklyn College from 1973 to 1991 and was visiting artist at Yale University, and Syracuse University.
His works are included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hirschhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., and in other museums and private collections worldwide.