Description

This is one of four mythological themed works on paper in our collection. It is also the only one of two that we have in purple.  

Grippi was known for his figural work.  The last photo shows (on the right) his large scale Figures (1960) exhibited at MOMA's 1962 show, "Recent Paintings U.S.A.: The Figure."

Details

• Salvatore Grippi (American, 1921-2017)
• Untitled mythological 
• Purple ink and wash on paper
  
• Signed and dated in lower center
  
• 17 1/2" x 19 3/4" (overall) 8 1/2" x 11" (paper)
• Newly matted and framed under plexiglass
• Overall toning to paper, some marks and smudges in lower right quadrant

About the Artist

We were extremely lucky to purchase a collection of Salvatore Grippi’s works upon the sale of his estate by his heirs in 2017. An important member of the New York School of Abstract Expressionists, Grippi was born in 1921 in Buffalo NY. Like many artists of his generation, he served in Europe during World War II. After the war, he studied at the Art Students League, the Museum of Modern Art School, and Atelier 17, the famous printmaking studio run by British artist Stanley William Hayter, who taught printmaking to many abstract expressionists including Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. Grippi later contributed an etching to the well-known 1958 portfolio Twenty-One Etchings and Poems, which included work by artists and poets Frank O'Hara, Dylan Thomas, Franz Kline, and Grippi's brother Peter Grippe. From 1953 to 1955 Grippi worked in Florence (Italy) on a Fulbright Scholarship and eventually moved to Ithaca College in 1968 to establish its art department. Grippi remained at Ithaca until his retirement in 1991 and lived in worked in upstate New York until his death in 2017.

A sense of human conflict and existential angst, perhaps a reaction to his experiences in World War II, is particularly evident in his highly acclaimed postwar period. These abstracted figural drawings, collages, and mythologically themed works share a certain affinity with nearly contemporary artists such as Alberto Giacometti and Francis Bacon. His later still life paintings, on the other hand, demonstrate Grippi's adoption of a gestural style and method of action painting in in which mundane objects like paper bags, milk cartons, bottles, cups, spoons and fruit shapes emerge from thick layers of paint.  

Grippi won accolades throughout his long and prolific career. He exhibited at the prestigious Carnegie International in 1958-59 and his work is in the permanent collection of MOMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art and the Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University.