This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  Allan d'Arcangelo was born in Buffalo, New York on June 16, 1930. He studied at the University of Buffalo, City College of New York and the New School for Social Research, also privately with Boris Lurie and under John Golding and Fernando Belain at Mexico City College. He lived and worked in New York City where he has been instructor at the School of Visual Arts from 1963 to 1968, Professor of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York in 1968, Professor of Art, Brooklyn College in 1973, Artist-in-Residence, Aspen Institute from 1965 to 1967, visiting artist at Yale in 1969, Syracuse in 1971, University of Alabama in 1972, University of Wisconsin in 1972, Skowhegan School of Art, Maine in 1974, Memphis Academy of Art in 1975, Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 1977. He was the winner of awards from University of Omaha in 1966, and Hofstra University in 1967.
During the 1960s, d'Arcangelo was linked with Pop Art, but he is better known for his pictures of highways and roadblocks made during the 1960s. He returned to highway imagery more directly in the 1970s. In the spring of 1980 he had his first one-man show in New York in five years, showing new pictures that are simplified scenic landscapes. His American industrial scenes seem more related to the pristine work of Charles Sheeler than to the Pop of Roy Lichtenstein.
In the early 1970s D'Archangelo moved to a farm in the Catskill Mountains and gradually changed his style to rougher, more primitive works. He died of leukemia in New York City on December 17, 1998.
Sources include:
Contemporary Artists
Art in America, February 1999
Written and compiled by Jean Ershler Schatz, artist and researcher from Laguna Woods, California.
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Biography from Rogallery.com:
| Allan D'Arcangelo was born in Buffalo, New York. He earned a
degree in history from the University of Buffalo and then moved to
Mexico City where he studied art and, in 1958, had his first one-man
show. His style, loosely termed "hard edge" or constructivist
art, is based on spatial relationships. A keen sense of perception,
complemented by expert use of color tones and shadows, points up these
relationships in forceful compositions.
It has been said that
D'Arcangelo "has the ability to defy, yet document, spatial
relationships at the same time." The recipient of fifteen awards and
commissions, D 'Arcangelo has had frequent one-man shows, many of which
traveled to prominent museums throughout America. His work appears in
more than thirty public collections, including those of the Museum of
Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum in New York,
the Detroit Institute of Art, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
His
reputation as a Pop artist was established by his first New York
one-man exhibition in 1963 where he showed his first acrylic paintings
of the American highway and industrial landscape, such as Highway U.S.
1 – No. 3 (1963; Richmond, VA Mus. F.A.). Such large-scale canvases
visually transported the viewer through a time sequence, as if
traveling along a highway, catching glimpses of trees, dividing lines,
signs and route markers. In subsequent works D’Arcangelo continued to
examine the American landscape both as directly experienced and in the
form of generalized contemporary symbols. An essentially flat and
impersonal style allowed him to suggest an illusionistic space without
sacrificing the viewer’s consciousness of the picture plane. This
ambiguity between real and fictive space is further enforced in works
such as Guard Rail (1964; Richmond, VA, S. and F. Lewis priv. col.) by
the attachment of real objects such as rear-view mirrors or cyclone
fences.
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Biography from Butler Institute of American Art:
| American painter and printmaker, Allan D'Arcangelo studied painting in Mexico City from 1957 to 1959 with John Golding (b 1929) under the terms of the G.I. Bill. His reputation as a Pop artist was established by his first New York one-man exhibition in 1963 where he showed his first acrylic paintings of the American highway and industrial landscape, such as "Highway U.S. 1 – No. 3" (1963; Richmond, VA Mus. F.A.).
Such large-scale canvases visually transported the viewer through a time sequence, as if traveling along a highway, catching glimpses of trees, dividing lines, signs and route markers. In subsequent works, D’Arcangelo continued to examine the American landscape both as directly experienced and in the form of generalized contemporary symbols. An essentially flat and impersonal style allowed him to suggest an illusionistic space without sacrificing the viewer’s consciousness of the picture plane.
This ambiguity between real and fictive space is further enforced in works such as "Guard Rail" (1964; Richmond, VA, S. and F. Lewis priv. col.) by the attachment of real objects such as rear-view mirrors or cyclone fences.
In later paintings such as "Skewed Star" (1974; Greensboro, NC, Weatherspoon A.G.) D’Arcangelo remained committed to his subject-matter, but moved away from Pop Art in favour of a stylized mechanization of the image that recalled earlier treatments of the American landscape by Precisionists such as Charles Sheeler and Ralston Crawford. |
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