Angelo Di Benedetto

1940s Oil Painting Portrait of Two Figures, American Modernist Figurative

1947

Angelo Di Benedetto Born New Jersey 1913 Died Central City, CO 1992 The son of Italian immigrants from the Salerno province in southern Italy, as a teenager Di Benedetto worked to study at the Cooper Union Art School in New York City (1930-34) from which he graduated with a certificate in freehand drawing. He won a scholarship to the Boston Museum Art School where he studied for three years, beginning in 1934. In 1937, he entered his first juried exhibition at the Montclair Museum in New Jersey, winning first prize and first honorable mention. In December 1938, the Royal Netherlands Steamship Line sent him on a two-month ethnological study trip to Haiti, his first exposure to a different environment outside the United States. In 1940, his Haitian paintings were exhibited at the Montross Gallery in New York – his first solo show. Before World War II, Di Benedetto traveled extensively around the United States doing regional paintings. During the war in 1941, Di Benedetto volunteered for a secret mission based in Eritrea, Africa before the Allied invasion. Following Africa, he served as an orientation officer and aerial photographic officer in the District of Columbia. In 1945 he was assigned to a mapping unit at Buckley Airfield in Denver where he served until his discharge in 1946. Like many other servicemen stationed at the time in Colorado, Di Benedetto chose to remain in Colorado, impressed by the state’s physical grandeur and healthful climate. He settled in the old mining town of Central City in 1947. In 1949 Di Benedetto and his wife, ceramist Lee Porzio, opened the Benpro Art School in his studio where he conducted summer art classes. In 1950, Di Benedetto teamed up with Frank Vavra to open the Denver Art Center. He and Vavra were founding members of the 15 Colorado Artists. Denver Art Center in downtown Denver only lasted about a year. Undeterred by its lack of success, Di Benedetto continued to give workshops, classes, and lectures in Denver and elsewhere. His efforts earned him an honorary doctorate from the University of Colorado in 1977. For more than three decades he explored the circle in paint, sculpture, and shaped canvas. Because abstraction touched upon his deep feelings and spirituality, he felt he could make visible that part of life which “we feel but almost never see.” Di Benedetto died in Central City, Colorado in 1992.