Artist: Vincent Pepi (1926 - )
Nationality:American
Movement: abstract expressionism
Media: Painting (find the reproductions here! or email to Steven.china@gmail.com get more about this artist painting reproductions informations)
Influences:

Biography:
Vincent Pepi studied at the High School of Music and Art, Cooper Union and Pratt Institute. These studies combined with his travels to Africa and Mexico, covinced him of the over- whelming importance of Europe for the development of American art. In 1949 Pepi went directly to the source-Rome- at the same time that the Abstract Expressioniat movement began at home. Three years later, in 1951, Pepi joined with many of the innovators of Action Painting in New York City. Upon his return to the United States, the artist studied briefly with Hans Hofmann, painting works parallel with Pollock, DeKooning, Kline, Marcarelli and others.Like so many others, he felt Surrealism's impact, adapting automatic techniques and transforming them into his own kind of gesture painting. Along with other first generation Abstract Expressionists, he showed his work at the Stable Gallery in 1953 and at the March Gallery on Tenth Street, from 1955 till its closing in 1960. Pepi separated himself from other artists of his time, since he felt uncomfortable with the New York /Art Scene/, and was never certain where he fit in. ( though its clear from today's vantage point that he fit right in the center.} He attended the /Club/ from time to time, but preferred his own studio and a more solitary existence. A graphics business which he created permitted him to live and paint, freeing him from the necessity of regularly exhibiting his work. Pepi's art certainly posseses affinities with other New York School Action Painters, but retains its own uniqueness. His choice to live in Italy from 1949-51, during a crucial time in the formation of the New York School , as well as his preference for painting in a consistently smaller format, may have obscured the recognition and fame that otherwise might have been his. The artist's acknowledged sources range from old masters to the Futurists (especially Boccioni and Balla) : from Klee and Kandinsky to Matta, Gorky and Pepi's contemporaries. His academically trained teacher in Italy, Beppe Guzzi, helped him to incoroporate rigorous discipline into his painting, as well as introducing him to a number of important Italian painters and sculptors. Like Pollock and other Abstract Expressionists he admires, Pepi has always loved music, particularly jazz, going as far as learning to play the tenor saxaphone. Color and music appear parallel to him: the artist/ musician improvises with both. And so it follows that Pepi's own automatic painting and line poems/ are reminiscent of works by Paul Klee, with the latter's powerful equations of color, line and music. Pepi defines himself as an academic artist, but one who felt he had to take that /main highway between Cezanne and Kandinsky/. His paintings do indeed, reveal a Cezanne-like underpining of abstract structure, while adopting the free improvisatory phase of Kandinsky at the same time. It is the revelation of the unconscious that Pepi seeks in his work. He wants his work to be spontaneous and uncontrived. Pepi loves Gorky's work. Like Gorky, he is pleased when metamorphosis in art occurs and a leaf turns into a bird, which then becomes part of a face. While he does not set about planning for or searching for images, it is okay with him when they occur. When I met Pepi, he had just heard Bela Bartok's Piano Concerto, composed in 1926, the year of his own birth. It /knocked him out/ he told me, and it is clear why. The classical, yet abstract, sometimes tonal and sometimes atonal music of Bartok still sounds modern to us today. The same can be said for the paintings of Vincent Pepi. Greta Berman, Author, Art Historian, Julliard School of Music,New York

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Artworks in Museum Collections: (40)