Biography​

​Vincent Baldassano, a graduate of Wagner College, Staten Island, NY with Master of Fine Arts, in Painting & Drawing from the University of Oregon, has taught painting and mixed media at universities, colleges and professional art schools throughout the US, including the Universities of Connecticut, Cincinnati, and Buffalo; the National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts, NYC, Silvermine School of Art, New Canaan, CT and Gateway Community College, New Haven, CT.
 
Mr. Baldassano is a recipient of numerous painting grant, residencies and fellowships, including NYSCA, CAPS Grants, and SUNY Painting Fellowships.  He has been a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome, the Vermont Studio Center and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. His work is in many private and public collections in the United States, Europe and Asia, including the Pepsi Cola Corporation, Pfizer Corporation, the New York Federal Building, Housatonic Museum of Art, and the Savannah College of Art & Design,
 
National and international exhibitions numbering over 50 solo shows and over 100 group exhibitions include The American Academy in Rome, The National Academy School, NY, the Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY, The Butler Museum of American Art, Ohio and the Aldrich and Stamford Museums in Connecticut.
 
In addition to teaching and exhibiting, Mr. Baldassano was a founding member of the Manhattan Breakfast Club during the early 70’s and 80’s in Soho, New York City where he lived at that time.  Latter, while living in Westchester and Connecticut he was owner of ArtPak Transport Ltd, NYC; Station Gallery, Katonah, NY; Executive Director at Contemporary Graphic Arts, Norwalk, Ct, Managing Director at Northern Westchester Center for the Arts, Mount Kisco, NY and Gallery Director at Silvermine Guild Art Center, New Canaan, CT. He is currently Professor of Art at Gateway Community College, New Haven, CT and on the faculties of Western Connecticut State University, and The National Academy of Design.

Critical Essay 

​VINCENT BALDASSANO: COLOR AND FORM, COLOR AS FORM
 
By Peter Frank
 
At the middle of the last century, American art seemed charged with a moral imperative: to be only about itself, only about art, only about the interior spirit, whether that of the artist or that shared by artist and audience. Such purity of intention – understandable after nearly 100 years of utopian modernist ideology and a world war that shattered the certainty of such convictions – gave authority to non-objective form and refined, reductive content. But art’s other nature, its antic spirit, began its resurgence in the face of such dour rigor, so that by the early-mid-1960s a young painter could take away not only austerity but jocosity from the example of abstract expressionism. Wit and sensuosity could return; Matisse and Miro could rejoin Mondrian and Malevich. 
 
Even as an undergraduate Vincent Baldassano unlocked his palette and unfettered his line, and in the six decades since he has only broadened his command over the optical and the sensual. Baldassano was an image-maker in his youth, something more now, but his engagement with (not just of) color and contour has always been clever and graceful, indebted to pop art’s – indeed, pop culture’s -- visual and social atmosphere even as it has avoided typical pop reference to the artifacts of consumerism. He would rather derive his forms and tonalities from the natural elements of a still life – the fruits, the vegetables, the flowers – than from their package labels, rather catch the glint of a church window than that of a bus. This is not to diminish pop, photo-realism, or other such tendencies, but only to distinguish Baldassano’s approach as classical, reliant above all on tradition, personal aesthetic impulse, and visual as well as intellectual self-sustenance. 
 
The structural complexity of Baldassano’s painting – almost from the beginning of his career, but powerfully asserted in recent work – does not merely support the allure of his art but, in being so attractive, presents the art as available, accessible even to the more casual eye. This intricate imagery is not hard to understand, but only a bit diffident in articulating pictorial identity. Some forms are more architectural, others more gemlike, still others evocative of landscape in their displays of sinewy planes and swaths of verdancy. Many seem caught at a moment of metamorphosis, as if Baldassano had dreamt of rivers and doors and flashes of fire co-existing in the same experiential as well as retinal space. 
 
The enduring ghost of surrealism animates this work. It has always inflected Baldassano’s art, but by now it has become an inhabitant of his muse’s manse. The instability, even volatility, of identifiable form in these recent paintings allows us to view them first as abstractions, then as apparitions, then as apprehensions, as evasive as, well, dreams. At the same time, the paintings do derive from the world around the artist; the location titles given so many of the works betrays the fact that Baldassano takes inspiration from the light and vegetation of western Connecticut and the lower Hudson Valley – and no less from the foreign climes he travels to, most particularly to Italy, Portugal, northern Africa, and other Mediterranean and Mediterranean-adjacent places. Architecture and history deeply inform these latter works, while burgeoning color-shapes comprise those Baldassano paints at home. But the same exuberance of form and intensity of color infuse his art no matter where it references. Or what – even the human figure makes an occasional appearance.
 
In fact, where a figural form, even one seemingly quoted from antiquity, can be recognized, the whole context as well as structure invested in Baldassano’s art comes forth – not as the ultimate key to his abstraction (there is no “aha” moment), but as the scale of imagination that energizes these paintings (or, if you would, pictures). Keenly aware of his artistic heritage, the Italian-American, born and raised in New York in its postwar heyday, regards art not simply as a human endeavor, but as humankind’s assertion of its own metaphysical vitality. Art in this regard is a mirror held up to the soul – the collective soul even more than the individual. 
 
A series of paintings produced during the Great Pandemic not only embodies Baldassano’s humanist – neo-humanist? – abstraction but converts it through example into a declaration of beauty. Not of pure beauty, but of a conditional beauty, an opulence distilled from the world around us so that the things we know and the places we’ve been – and the things we conjure and the places we imagine. – recapitulate as bold, often almost heraldic compositions, rendered on fabric and hung unstretched. When Baldassano exhibited this series as the centerpiece of his survey show, “To Be Continued,” at the Housatonic Museum of Art in 2022, he filled a gallery with an arrangement of these banners hung at irregular intervals so as to baffle passage, as in a maze. In certain works this arrangement thrust the viewer almost up against yawning areas of deep reds and blues, and in others put a distance between art and observer so that they took on the air of painterly, asymmetric bunting. Each banner painting, for all its vastness and variegated temperatures, is a visual experience in itself, but when installed as a labyrinth they conjoin into a heady, almost dizzying somatic as well as optical experience.
 
In these recent banner works Baldassano becomes something of a color-field painter – without falling into the visual and methodological reductivism that aligned color-field painting with its minimalist counterpart(s) in the 1960s. Even while incorporating repetitive geometric devices, Baldassano relies on color to assert the deliberative presence of a painter’s eye and mind – and stimulate the response of a (perhaps literally) captive audience. He would have us surrender not to the maze itself but to its components and the retinal delights they yield. Baldassano sharpens his inquiry with these irregular cloth panels: does the eye derive pleasure at the expense of meaning? Is that pleasure the meaning of the work? Or is the meaning out in the world and do color and form lead us there, or at least point subtly but extravagantly to that meaning? Does color mean itself? Does shape? What lies beyond what we see around us, and beyond what we see in painting? No wonder Vincent Baldassano is still painting six decades on; neither he nor we have the answer, but we get such pleasure from the question.
 
Los Angeles
September-October 2022
 
 
Peter Frank (art critic) Peter Solomon Frank (born 1950, New York) is an American art critic, curator, and poet who lives and works in Los Angeles. Frank is known for curating shows at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in the 1970s and 1980s.[1][2] He has worked curatorially for Documenta, the Venice Biennale, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, and many other national and international venues.[3] Peter Frank
  
Born Nationality Almamater Known for Movement 1950
New York, New York American ColumbiaUniversity Art Criticism, Art Writing Contemporary art
            
Contents
Early life Work Publications External links
  
References
    
Early life
Frank was born in New York to Reuven Frank, who was an Emmy Award-winning President of NBC News and Bernice Frank, née Kaplow, a music librarian at the Tenafly Public Library.[4] He received his B.A. and M.A. in art history from Columbia University.[5] Work Frank contributes articles to numerous publications and has written many monographs and catalogs for one person and group exhibitions. In his early career he was somewhat associated with the Fluxus movement in New York. He has also organized many theme and survey shows for placement at institutions throughout the world, taught at colleges and universities and lectured in North America and Europe. He was the Senior Curator at the Riverside Art Museum and an art critic for Angeleno magazine. He is a frequent contributor to The Huffington Post, Art in America, ARTnews, and Whitehot Magazine. Until July 9, 2008, he was (htt p://www.laweekly.com/2008-07-10/art-books/bow-out-shout-out/) a long-time critic for LA Weekly. He was a past editor of Visions Art Quarterly and was an art critic for The Village Voice and The SoHo Weekly News in New York. Publications Frank, Peter: "Plural Isms: California Art and Artists of the Mid- to Late 1970s". Under the Big Black Sun, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), 2011. Frank, Peter: "Context, Attitude, Community: The Early Years of the UCI Art Department", Best Kept Secret: UCI and the Development of Contemporary Art in Southern California. Laguna Art Museum, Laguna, California, 2011.
               Frank Peter: "Young Fluxus". Published by Artists Space / Open Studio, Barrytown, 1982.[6][7] External links Lust & Desire (http://www.art-st-urban.com/en/artpavillon/feuerman-carole-a.html) featuring hyper-realistic sculptor Carole Feuerman. Frank's LA Weekly Articles (http://www.laweekly.com/authors/peter-frank/) Riverside Art Museum (http://www.riversideartmuseum.org) Extensive biography (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-frank) at the Huffington Post Peter Frank (https://www.linkedin.com/in/peterfrankart) on LinkedIn 'That Layered look" by Peter Frank (art critic) [1] (https://wsimag.com/art/60407-that-layered-l ook-ii) References "The Guggenheim: Singular Pluralism" (https://www.artforum.com/print/198104/the-guggenh eim-singular-pluralism-38998). www.artforum.com. Retrieved 2022-03-20. "The Guggenheim Museums and Foundation" (https://www.guggenheim.org/publication/pub lication_author/peter-frank). The Guggenheim Museums and Foundation. Retrieved 2022-03-20. "Peter Frank - Collaborators - Independent Curators International" (https://curatorsintl.org/col laborators/peter-frank). curatorsintl.org. Retrieved 2022-03-20. "Janet Milstein Cox, an Artist, Is Wed to Peter Frank, Critic" (https://www.nytimes.com/1979/1 0/22/archives/janet-milstein-cox-an-artist-is-wed-to-peter-frank-critic.html). The New York Times. 1979-10-22. ISSN 0362-4331 (https://www.worldcat.org/issn/0362-4331). Retrieved 2022-03-20. "Jury Spotlight: An Interview with Peter Frank" (https://www.startupartfair.com/blog/peter-inter view). stARTup. Retrieved 2022-03-20. "Frank, Peter" (https://dx.doi.org/10.1093/benz/9780199773787.article.b00067623), Benezit Dictionary of Artists, Oxford University Press, 2011-10-31, retrieved 2022-03-20 7. Frank, Peter (1983). Something Else Press : an annotated bibliography (http://worldcat.org/o clc/9155222). McPherson. ISBN 0-914232-40-1. OCLC 9155222 (https://www.worldcat.org/o clc/9155222). Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Peter_Frank_(art_critic)&oldid=1078332191" This page was last edited on 21 March 2022, at 01:22 (UTC). Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0; additional terms may apply. By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.