ABOUT

Biography

Lawrence Calcagno was born on March 23, 1913 in Potrero Hill, San Francisco, California. His parents, Vincent and Anna de Rosa Calcagno were Italian immigrants. At the age of ten he moved to the family ranch-homestead in the Santa Lucia Mountains, Monterey County near Big Sur, California where he spent the following ten years. As a child, Calcagno was interested in art and began drawing and painting. In 1935, he left the homestead and joined the Merchant Marine and traveled all the way to Asia.

In 1941 at the beginning of World War II Calcagno joined the United States Army Air Corps, where he served for three years. During his service he was recognized as an artist. His drawing titled: "Watch in the Night" won first prize in the national Army art contest in the Southwest Regional competition.

Benefiting from the G.I. Bill in 1947 Lawrence Calcagno enrolled at the California School of Fine Arts, San Francisco, California. His teachers were Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still and Ad Reinhardt along with instructors, Edward Corbett and Richard Diebenkorn. Another artist and friend whose work influenced Calcagno early on was Seattle-based Mark Tobey. In 1950 Calcagno left California School of Fine Arts for Europe. He went to Paris, France to study at L’Academie de la Grande Chaumiere. In 1951 he went to Florence to study the Renaissance. He enrolled at the Instituto d’Arte Statale.

Calcagno continued to work and study in Paris until 1955. During this time, Calcagno became acquainted with Martha Jackson, who mounted his first one-man at her New York gallery in 1955.

Beauford Delaney and Lawrence Calcagno, an unlikely pair, the two became friends in Paris in the early 1950s and remained close over the next twenty years.

Delaney and Calcagno had many things in common. Both men committed themselves wholeheartedly to lyrical abstraction, though Delaney's work was ultimately influenced more by Claude Monet's fluid water-lily paintings, than by the color-field painters so important in Calcagno's formation as an artist. Both men shared an interest in the philosophical underpinnings of their abstract work, and both were also aware of their social isolation that accompanied their homosexuality. Calcagno's abstract "landscapes of the mind" with their recognizable and consistent horizons derived in part from the artist's sense of the universal, yet mysterious harmony of nature. Through Delaney, Calcagno also became friends with James Baldwin and the three travelled together.

The relationship between Delaney and Calcagno can be summarized in a single phrase that Delaney wrote in a letter to Calcagno in 1968, in which he described a “deathless kinship that is constant [and] is always alive and close between us.”

Calcagno was friends with the African American artist, Jack Whitten. In 1964 Calcagno supported Whitten alongside artists Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence and Wayne Thiebaud to secure Whitten a grant for minority artists from the John Hay Whitney Foundation.

Lawrence Calcagno developed a gift for teaching as well as painting, working at New York University and eventually Carnegie Mellon University.

In 1956 Calcagno accepted the position of assistant professor in the art department at the Albright Art School in the University at Buffalo, New York where he stayed until 1958. He went on to teach from 1958 to 1959 at the University of Illinois, Urbana. In 1960 he moved to New York and became a part-time instructor at New York University. In 1965 Calcagno became Andrew Mellon Professor in Painting at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he stayed until 1968. During his stay at Carnegie Mellon, Calcagno made art in a style reminiscent of the sculptures and drawings of his colleague and critic, Donald Judd. Calcagno was a fellow at the McDowell and Yaddo artist colonies in the 1960s, and he eventually purchased a home in Taos, New Mexico after his 1972 Wurlitzer residency.