Allan D'Arcangelo (June 16, 1930 – December 17, 1998) was an American artist and printmaker, best known for his paintings of highways and road signs that border on pop art and minimalism, precisionism and hard-edge painting, and also surrealism. His subject matter is distinctly American and evokes, at times, a cautious outlook on the future of this country.

Biography

Allan D'Arcangelo was born in Buffalo, New York to Italian immigrant parents. He studied at the University at Buffalo from 1948 to 1953, where he got his bachelor's degree in history. After college, he moved to Manhattan and picked up his studies again at the New School of Social Research and the City University of New York. At this time, he encountered Abstract Expressionist painters who were in vogue at the moment. After joining the army in the mid 1950s, he used the GI Bill to study painting at Mexico City College from 1957 to 1959, driving there over 12 days in an old bakery truck retrofitted as a camper. However, he returned to New York in 1959, in search of the unique American experience. It was at this time that his painting took on a cool sensibility reminiscent of Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol. However, throughout his life, D'Arcangelo remained politically active, and this is evident in his painting, though not necessarily in an overt way. His interests engaged with the environment, anti-Vietnam War protests, and the commodification and objectification of female sexuality. Through his painting and writings, it is clear that D'Arcangelo had a palpable discomfort with the social mores of his time, which can be read in the detached treatment with which he treated his subjects. D'Arcangelo first achieved recognition in 1962, when he was invited to contribute an etching to The International Anthology of Contemporary Engraving: America Discovered; his first solo exhibition came the next year, at the Thibaud Gallery in New York City. In 1965 he contributed three screenprints to Original Edition's 11 Pop Artists portfolio. By the 1970s, D'Arcangelo had received significant recognition in the art world. He was well known for his paintings of quintessentially American highways and infrastructure, and in 1971 was commissioned by the Department of the Interior to paint the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington state. However, his sense of morality always trumped his interest in art world fame. In 1975, he decided to quit the gallery that had been representing him for years, Marlborough Gallery, because of the way they handled Mark Rothko's legacy. This ultimately sealed his fate of exclusion in the art establishment. He retired to a farm in Kenoza Lake with his family, where he continued to paint and even make earth works. Because of this move, D'Arcangelo's legacy is perhaps less well known than it could have been. He was considered a figure who straddled the lines between many styles of art and was hard to categorize. His cool, Pop-like sensibility also met with the usual crisis concerning art movements in the contemporary art world; usually, art movements only last a decade and are then replaced with a new style. However, he did return to the city to continue teaching at Brooklyn College from 1973 to 1992 and the School of Visual Arts from 1982 to 1992, where he had also previously taught from 1963 to 1968. Finally, he died in 1998 in New York City due to complications with leukemia.

Artistic style

D'Arcangelo rejected Abstract Expressionism, though his early work has a painterly and somewhat expressive feel. He quickly turned to a style of art that seemed to border on Pop Art and Minimalism, Precisionism and Hard-Edge painting. Evidently, he didn't fit neatly in the category of Pop Art, though he shared subjects (women, signs, Superman) and techniques (stencil, assemblage) with these artists. To D'Arcangelo, his style was less important than the subject matter he depicted and he believed that a culture of protest and resistance was more meaningful than any aesthetic concerns. And the subject he chose to explore first and foremost was the American experience. At first he touched on specific motifs in the contemporary American consciousness, such as President Kennedy's tragic death in "Place of Assassination" (1965) and environmental concerns in "Can Our National Bird Survive?" (1962). However, he quickly turned to expansive, if detached, scenes of the American highway. These paintings are reminiscent of de Chirico — though perhaps not as interested in isolation — and Dali — though there is a stronger interest in the present and disinterest in the past. These paintings also have a sharp quality that is reminiscent of the Precisionist style, or, more specifically, Charles Sheeler. These paintings also show a deep interest in the contradictions of flatness and perspective as represented on a canvas — ideas that, likewise, artists of the Middle Ages and early Renaissance pondered often. Overall, D'Arcangelo makes an effort at distilling his subject matter into its most honest, intelligible, and synoptic descriptions; his paintings are interpretations of the American experience, not just his own memories.

1950s

Before D'Arcangelo returned to New York, his style was roughly figurative and reminiscent of folk art.

Early 1960s

During the early 1960s, Allan D'Arcangelo was linked with Pop Art. "Marilyn" (1962) depicts an illustrative head and shoulders on which the facial features are marked by lettered slits to be "fitted" with the eyebrows, eyes, nose and mouth which appear off to the right in the composition. In "Madonna and Child" (1963), the featureless faces of Jackie Kennedy and Caroline are ringed with haloes, enough to make their status as contemporary icons perfectly clear. Aside from film stars and icons from pop culture, D'Arcangelo also turned to political matters. His well known painting "Can Our National Bird Survive?" (1962) was painted the same year Rachel Carson published her seminal Silent Spring; its ambiguity also allows the viewer to interpret it as a statement about the Vietnam War.

Late 1960s

By the mid 1960s, D'Arcangelo had abandoned figurative elements and turned to the American landscape, or, more specifically, the highway. D'Arcangelo is better known for his pictures of highways and roadblocks, which pictured deep perspectival vistas in a simplified, flat plane, the view as seen from the driver's seat as one zooms along the seemingly never-ending American highway in most any state. He was initially interested in painting these scenes in a series, like a film strip, as the view changes outside your car window. In these paintings, the artist treats every single object with the same quality — both the same flatness and lack of extreme detail. This reads as detached; D'Arcangelo sought to investigate our separation from the natural world, which become more of a symbol than a description in these paintings. He was actually critiqued for these paintings as much as he was celebrated; Pop Art was considered a flat style, lacking perspectival plays of space. However, he argued that despite the receding lines of roads, the paintings ultimately were flat. In fact, these works are full of contrasts and contradictions: the flat surface has deep linear perspective; though there are recognizable motifs present, they are highly schematized; and abstract designs are mixed with recognizable objects, such as trees.

1970s

Next came the series "Barriers", in which cropped, abstracted imagery of road barriers were superimposed over the one-point perspectival highway vistas. These were a move further towards concern with abstract, two-dimensionality without negating the element culled from seen aspects of the American landscape. The series called "Constellation" (there are 120 in all) further abstracted the view of road barriers into perspectival, jutting patterns thrusting across the canvas against a white ground. The element of the seen is never obliterated and always primary in D'Arcangelo's dialectic, as amply evidenced in his return to highway imagery in the 1970s. Though works from these two series appear abstract, D'Arcangelo still referred to them as landscapes because they generate the same sense of endless space and forces the space of the canvas to move between flatness and depth.

Late 1970s and early 1980s

For several years during this time, D'Arcangelo slowed down his formerly prolific output. He shed highway motifs completely and turned, instead, to cropped views of buildings and other structures, containers, and views outside of an airplane. In the spring of 1982 he had his first one-man exhibition in New York in five years. The new pictures were rather scenic landscape vistas, simplified and showing his ongoing concern with jutting perspectival space, now inhabited by flatly painted images of highway overpasses, a jet wing, grain field, electric lines. Indications of the American industrial scene seem more related to the hand-painted, pristine look of Charles Sheeler than to the pop of, say, Roy Lichtenstein. In form, there is also a reminiscence of field paintings in the simplicity and emblematic quality of these works. Now, as before, the main element in D'Arcangelo's pictures is the post-abstraction search for, as he put it, "icons that matter", monumental archetypes of the contemporary American expansive landscape highway.

Exhibitions

Solo exhibitions

1958 1961 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1974 1975 1977 1978 1979 1979–1980 1982 1984 1991 2000 2005 2009 2014 2017 2018

Group exhibitions

1958 1963 1963–1964 1964 1965 1965–1966 1965–1967 1966 1966–1967 1966–1970 1967 1967–1968 1968 1968–1969 1969 1969–1970 1970 1971 1971–1972 1972 1973 1973–1974 1974 1974–1975 1975 1975–1976 1975–1977 1976 1976–77 1977 1977–1978 1977–1979 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1984–1985 1985 1985–1986 1986 1986–1987 1987 1988–1989 1990 1991 1994–1995 1997 1997–2002 1998 1998–1999 1999 2001 2004 2007 2012–2013 2012–2016 2014 2015 2016–2017 2017

Collections

D'Arcangelo's work is found in the permanent collections of major museums and other public institutions worldwide.