Antonio Salemme, Italian-American painter (b. 1892)
Antonio Salemme (November 2, 1892 − May 2, 1995) was an Italian-born American sculptor and painter best known for his sculpted portraits (including John F. Kennedy, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Albert Einstein, Paul Robeson, Ethel Waters) and classical nudes. After studying in Boston and Rome before World War I, and serving in the Italian army during that conflict, Salemme settled in New York and became a prominent figure in the Greenwich Village cultural scene of the 1920s and 1930s. Three of his sculpted portraits (of Robeson, Waters, and Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson) are in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery. His Kennedy portrait is at the John F. Kennedy Library. Salemme's life-size nude of Paul Robeson entitled "Negro Spiritual" (1926) was exhibited to acclaim in New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Paris, and became a cause celebré when it was banned from an exhibition in Philadelphia in 1930. Salemme was the recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships (1932 and 1936). In the 1940s he became increasingly interested in painting, which he had studied as a teenager. Salemme's Annual summer visits to Rockport, Massachusetts, resulted in numerous post-Impressionist-inspired sea- and landscapes. After a 43-year career in New York, Salemme and his wife Martha moved to rural eastern Pennsylvania in 1962. Working from memory and imagination, and inspired by Hindu philosophy and his devoted practice of Zen Buddhist meditation, Salemme continued to evolve artistically over the next 30 years, painting and sculpting prolifically almost until his death at age 102. In 2013 an Italian historical society published a selection of Salemme's letters and photographs from his military service in World War I. The artist's work was the subject of a retrospective exhibition at the Sigal Museum in Easton, Pennsylvania, in 2014.