TitleUntitled
Artist
Vincent Longo
(1923 - 2017)
Date1995
MediumAcrylic on wood panel
DimensionsUnframed: 35 1/8 × 32 in.
Framed: 36 1/2 × 33 3/8 × 2 5/8 in.
SubmissionNA diploma presentation, October 21, 1998
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, NY
Object number1998.15
Label TextPainter and printmaker Vincent Longo has investigated the possibilities of working within the matrix of a grid for more than forty years. Orphaned at the age of two, Longo lived in a Catholic boarding school before being adopted as a teenager by a relative in Brooklyn. He attended Textile High School, where he studied commercial art and soon befriended Edmond Casarella, NA, an older artist who would become a mentor to him. After graduating from high school, Longo enrolled in evening classes at The Cooper Union School for Advancement in Science and Art, following Casarella. The late 1940s was a period in which philosophical ideas were very much part of the artistic discourse. It was at Cooper Union, and particularly through the lectures of Leo Katz, that Longo first became introduced to Asian philosophies, the ideas of Carl Jung, and Theosophy, all of which began to influence his work. In 1951, Longo received a Fulbright grant and the following year traveled to Florence with his wife, artist Pat Adams, NA. In Italy he conducted his earliest investigations into abstraction, manifested as a study of archetypal motifs in art and architecture and their use in a religious setting. In 1955 Longo was hired to teach printmaking at the Brooklyn Museum Art School and the following year he and Adams, who had just won a Fulbright, traveled to France to study Neolithic sites in Brittany. The totemic abstractions that Longo and Adams witnessed confirmed for them the efficacy and universality of abstraction as a powerful mode of visual communication. Upon their return to the U.S., Longo took a teaching position at Bennington College, where he would stay for the next ten years. His work from the 1950s recalls the gestural explorations of Abstract Expressionism, but by the mid-1960s he began to incorporate the grid into his work, using it as a framework for abstraction, and often incorporating circle and square motifs. This would provide the foundation for his work over the next four decades: "The grid has been a constant in my work since the 60's but the paintings are not about grids - they have more to do with reconciling oppositions of form: hard - soft, all-over - central, flatness - spatial illusions, etc."
"Untitled" is divided into quadrants and combines two variations on the grid with a limited tonal range of yellows and greens. While his work is sometimes mistakenly referred to as serving a decorative function, given its repetition of pattern, the repeated geometric shapes are intended instead to initiate a contemplative experience in the viewer. For Longo, abstraction is a transcendent visual mode and one that is more reflective of an inner nature than any outside reference. As the artist has stated, abstraction is "intended to reflect, represent and present something other than, or more than, a grid or a lattice, suspended circle/square central construct. The viewer is meant to be lead to an affective state of concentration in which the visual means receded and their contents are unconcealed."
MNP
