TitleRoundabout
Artist
Angelo Ippolito
(1922 - 2001)
Date1982
MediumOil on linen
DimensionsUnframed: 66 1/4 x 58 5/8 in.
Framed: 66 3/4 x 59 1/8 x 1 3/8 in.
SubmissionNA diploma presentation, January 17, 2007
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, Gift of Michael and Jon Ippolito, 2006
Object number2007.1
Label TextAngelo Ippolito was, along with Charles Cajori, NA, Lois Dodd, NA, William King, NA, and Fred Mitchell, a founding member of the Tanager Gallery, one of the earliest cooperative galleries in New York. Ippolito was born in St. Arsenio, Italy in 1922 and emigrated to America with his parents in 1931. As a child he studied art at the Leonardo da Vinci School and from 1942 to 1945 served in the Army. Following his service, Ippolito returned to art by enrolling in the Amédée Ozenfant School of Fine Arts in New York from 1946 to 1947 before moving to the Brooklyn Museum Art School to study under John Ferren. Funded primarily by the GI Bill, Ippolito moved to Rome, Italy, at the end of the decade where he continued his studies at the Insituto Meschini with Italian abstractionist Afro Basaldella. It was not long after his return to the U.S., in 1952, that he helped found the Tanager Gallery, which was intended to be an extension of the artists' studios. Ippolito's work from the early 1950s are gestural abstractions that were stylistically linked to the Abstract Expressionist movement. While the artist admired the so-called "action painters" of the first generation of Abstract Expressionism, Ippolito was one of a number of younger artists who rejected the impassioned struggle that seemed to be embodied in their work. He felt that action painting had run its course, and noted that it "has gone on long enough to lose its risk. We know too well what can come out of it." Instead, the artist explored a much more lyrical type of abstraction that art historian John I. H. Baur referred to as Abstract Impressionism, and linked with Philip Guston, ANA elect, Hyde Solomon, and others. By the mid-1960s the artist's work had taken a decidedly geometric turn that culminated in a series of nearly Minimalist works at the end of the decade. In the 1970s Ippolito returned to representation in a vaguely Cubist mode that would presage the synthesis of these many elements by the early 1980s.
"Roundabout" is from a series of paintings that was inspired by the landscape of upstate New York and completed between 1976 and 1985. Here he has combined the geometric elements of previous series of representational works with subtle passages of gesture that recall his paintings of the 1950s. The artist has employed a limited tonal range and broad areas of predominantly neutral tones overlayed with smaller areas of yellow, pink, and blue. Ippolito's application of geometric forms is interspersed with numerous areas of the softer lyricism to which Baur referred, and the palette has become more specific. As one scholar has noted, "in these mature abstractions the palette is more precise, as though Ippolito's discursion into representation in the intervening years recalibrated his 'color pitch'."
MNP
