Vincent Campanella Paintings

"Vincent Campanella began his career in the Italian Renaissance and ended as a kind of Post-Modernist."
(Henry Adams in Vincent Campanella: Classical Abstractionist, 2007)

Born in New York in 1915, Campanella studied at the Leonardo Da Vinci Art School where the curriculum was based on the Naples Academy founded in the 1440s.  He  took this classical Renaissance training to the streets of New York, then-rural Astoria, Monhegan Island, and Wyoming.

As an easel artist for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the 1930s he painted and taught in Rock Springs, Wyoming.  There his style became Abstract and works of Classical Abstraction were recognized in art reviews and exhibitions.  He was represented by the Rehn Gallery in New York until the death of Frank Rehn in 1956.  His work has been shown at The Art Institute of Chicago, Carnegie Institute, Brooklyn Museum, Corcoran Art Gallery, Denver Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, San Diego Museum, San Francisco Museum, Seattle Museum, Toledo Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Universities of Nebraska, Tennessee and Wyoming.  He was a Fellow at the MacDowell Colony in 1968.  Retrospective shows of his work have been held at Hunter College (1995) and the Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art (2007).

Campanella taught at the University of Wyoming (1940), Columbia University (1946-49), the Kansas City Art Institute (1949-52) and Park College (1952-80). Notable students include Robert Morris and Dik Browne.  Click here for more information or to share your memories of this artist.