About the Artist

An artist who died too young – a heart attack at age forty-three – Attilio Salemme's paintings juxtapose elongated vertical rectangles in complex relationships that suggest groups of "presences," near human beings lonely in their inability to break through the artist's geometric overlay to attain human status.

Salemme was born in 1911 in a Boston suburb, the son of a sailor who also died young. Called upon to help support his mother and sister, Salemme left school, eventually joining the Marines at age sixteen in 1927.

Atillio went to Manhattan at 18 and made it his own, educating himself at the public library. For a living he held many menial jobs, including running elevators and a stint as a doorkeeper at the Guggenheim Museum. He started to think seriously of art as a career while living in the artistic milieu of Greenwich Village, though he had a conflicting interest in science. However, he vacillated between painting and writing, failing to paint a picture that struck him as “a personal statement” until he was 32.

He met his wife Lucia and other artists when he got a job as a framer in 1942 at the precursor of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Guggenheim Museum of Non-Objective Art.

In the eleven years of his life that remained, Salemme sold pictures to Manhattan’s Metropolitan, Whitney and Modern museums. He was also commissioned to paint murals for the posh Manhattan House and the old Moore-McCormack liner Argentina. Yet he was more respected than sought after; Salemme and his family stayed poor.

Salemme’s most familiar style was essentially a unique adaptation of Mondrian’s geometric approach to the representational; with what amounted almost to a T-square rigidity of line, he reduced the outlines of his figures to a compilation of rectangles and triangles, attenuated them, and then lined them up across the canvas, in a frieze-like design. His colors were almost always beautiful and bright, hence the subtlety of their effect: he pictured nightmares in the sunshine, petal-hued evils, well-scrubbed and enameled enigmas.

As the New York Times wrote in 1996, “[his figures] stand for a specific phase in the assimilation of Surrealism; these pin‐thin, near‐human figures relate to the ancient phenomenon of American loneliness.”

“Life,” Salemme once wrote, “has infinite doors to beckon with, and each day reveals new doors, and men continue to pass through new doors, and we live in an age when men are no longer content with discovering new doors, but have begun to close them and erect them around themselves. But there is no escape from the door that all doors lead to.”

Salemme died in 1955, and while not a major artist, his paintings were acknowledged for their surreal and metaphysical uniqueness. They may be found in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.

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