Ezio Martinelli

Ezio Martinelli (1913-1980), along with Theodore Roszak, David Smith, and Charles Seliger, formed the group of influential abstract artists who taught and worked at Sarah Lawrence College in the late 1940s and 1950s. His style was both gestural and sophisticated, coinciding with the language of painting that emerged with Abstract Expressionism in the mid-1940s, and his work represents an important contribution to the development of postwar American abstraction.

Martinelli's career was both diverse and complex. He received his training at the Fine Arts Academy in Bologna, Italy, and at the National Academy of Design in New York, receiving a transatlantic education that gave him a deep grounding in both the classical European traditions and the emerging vocabulary of American modernism. His training in Italy connected him to the great sculptural and painterly traditions of that country, while his New York studies placed him within the vibrant American art community during the formative years of the New York School.

Martinelli was primarily recognized as a painter, for which he won numerous awards throughout his career. His paintings characteristically combine gestural energy with careful compositional intelligence, producing pictures that hold together the impulsive freedom of Abstract Expressionist mark-making with the structural discipline of his European academic training. Later in his career he also turned successfully to sculpture, serving as the resident sculptor at the American Academy in Rome, one of the most prestigious positions available to an American sculptor of his era. He won the important commission for a monumental sculpture at the United Nations General Assembly Building in New York, an installation that placed his work in one of the most visible international settings in the world.

Martinelli received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship from 1956 to 1962, along with numerous other significant honors. His long teaching career at Sarah Lawrence College mentored generations of younger American artists. His paintings and sculptures are held in major American museum collections, where they remain vital documents of the transatlantic sensibility that shaped so much of postwar American abstract art.