A Published Biography for Twentieth Century Master, Costantino Proietto (1910-1979)

In July 2012, I received an email from Ms. Erin-Marie Wallace, M.A., Director of the Fine Arts Department, America’s Auction Network. While researching an original Costantino Proietto oil painting that was coming up for a televised auction in August 2012, Erin had come across my articles on the artist. At the time, she was pleased to find my original research, but could find little else about C.Proietto on the internet.
 
As a member of the subscription website AskArt.com, Erin Wallace is able to submit biographical information on any “listed artist”. Until now, most art-related websites list the artist as “Constantino Proietto”. I offered to write a short biography on “Costantino Proietto”, which is the proper spelling of the artist’s name. In order to confirm my facts, I spoke with Nunzio LoCastro, a cousin of the artist. From 1951 until the artist’s death in 1979, Nunzio LoCastro knew “Tino” well.
 
If you go to AskArt.com today, you will find the following biography of Costantino Proietto, as submitted by Erin-Marie Wallace M.A. and written by James McGillis, “an independent researcher for Costantino Proietto”.
 
Costantino Proietto (1910 - 1979) – Twentieth Century Italian Impressionist Painter. Born in Catania, Sicily and apprenticed to Prof. Fernand Cappuccio of the Academy of Art, Florence, Italy from 1924 until 1942. During Cappuccio’s restoration of the Basilica of Saint Mary, in Randazzo, Sicily, apprentice Proietto received on-the-job training from the master. In the central vault of the ancient basilica, Proietto’s palette knives restored frescoes and other artwork dating back to the thirteenth century.
 
During World War II, Proietto took the unusual step of emigrating from Italy to Switzerland, to France and finally to Stuttgart, Germany. While in Paris, the artist painted fabric patterns for a commercial fabric house. In 1942, the artist began his independent career in Stuttgart, Germany, where he settled for life. Among local residents and military patrons in Stuttgart, Proietto found a ready market for his self-described “spaddle work”.
 
Proietto’s photo album included prints of romantic locations throughout prewar Italy and Switzerland. When the War curtailed travel, the artist referred to his photo album for new subjects to paint. Other than one early watercolor, perhaps of his common law wife, Gisela, there are no brushstrokes in any known C. Proietto painting. Having earlier mastered the palette knife, the artist’s impasto techniques brought depth and drama to his many landscapes.
 
By the 1950’s the word “Kunstmaler”, which is German for “production painter”, appeared on the artist’s business card. Throughout his career, Proietto painted daily at his atelier, which was only a short walk from his apartment. While painting, Proietto wore slacks and a starched white shirt.
 
Typically, the artist might complete a small painting in a single day. A larger work might take a second day to finish. Such was the speed at which Proietto often worked. Known for his landscapes, the artist featured timeless architecture in every composition. By scraping away or omitting paint on the face of a canvas, Proietto added backlighting to many of his scenes. Although an accomplished portrait artist, Proietto landscapes rarely include more than a tiny human form.
 
From the early 1940’s, until well into 1970’s, the artist continued to paint six or seven days each week. In the early years, he took off for only enough time to market his works. After the War, he broke from his work twice each year. Loading his automobile with unframed works, he would then tour Germany, selling paintings as he traveled. By the early 1960’s, various Allied military bases in West Germany conducted art exhibitions. At those exhibitions, many U.S. and Canadian service members bought Proietto paintings to take back home.
 
Never painting directly from a tube of paint, the artist personally mixed every color that touched his canvases. At times, the chain-smoking artist would flick cigarette ashes into his mix of paint. In the tradition of his cathedral restoration, ashes pre-aged and accentuated the darker colors in his early paintings. In the 1950’s, with the advent of brighter, more durable paint formulas, the artist’s paintings brightened up, as well.
 
In 1957, Proietto visited the U.S., spending time with American cousins on either coast. By then, he had gallery representation and exhibitions in “New York, Los Angeles and Hollywood”.
 
In his later years, Costantino Proietto purchased vacation property at Sanremo, on the Italian Coast. With the strap of his 35-mm Leica camera always around his neck, “Tino” Proietto continued to search for new scenes to paint. Some later C.Proietto paintings depict the Italian Coast at Sanremo. Others, both early and late, depict the Capuchin Convent along the Amalfi Coast.
 
While in his early forties, the artist once told his American cousin, Nunzio LoCastro, “If I died tomorrow, I would regret nothing in my life. I have lived, loved and enjoyed every minute of every day”. True to his word, Costantino Proietto enjoyed each day of his life to the fullest. The artist painted until a year or two prior his death. At age sixty-nine, Costantino Proietto succumbed to an illness caused by toxic lead from his early paints.
 
Proietto’s career spanned at least thirty-five years. With a conservative estimate of one hundred-fifty new paintings each year, that would bring his career total to over five thousand signed originals. With that amazing productivity, the epitaph of Costantino Proietto might read, “Never a bad day; always a great new painting”.
 
On August 6, 2012, I was simultaneously online and on the telephone with America’s Auction Network. Shortly after midnight, EDT, the Costantino Proietto original oil painting came up for auction. After five minutes of furious bidding against another telephone bidder, I placed the successful bid. Until I receive the alpine landscape painting, I have only the photo provided by America’s Auction Network to publish here.
 
With two similar paintings having surfaced over the past year, we know that my new painting includes rural buildings and the Dolomite Mountains in Northeastern Italy. Of the similar C.Proietto paintings, the Karns family owns one and Nunzio LoCastro owns the other. Each painting features different buildings in the foreground, but the rural pathway and the Dolomite Mountains are their unifying elements. When I receive my new C.Proietto alpine painting, I will publish its image and other details here.

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By James McGillis at 04:28 PM | Fine Art | Comments (1) | Link

Another Costantino Proietto Painting of the Amalfi Coast is Revealed - 2011

 

Another Costantino Proietto Painting of the Amalfi Coast is Revealed.

   

We recently discovered that the signature on our oil painting of the Amalfi Coast is “C.Proietto”. Since then, I have been on a quest to find out more about, “The Man from Amalfi”, Signore Costantino Proietto (1910 - 1979). Soon after posting my original article on that subject, Ms. Marion Grayson of Belton, Texas sent me an image of her own C.Proietto. It is yet another Amalfi Coast masterpiece.

Although foreground objects differ, and the field of view varies, each painting was of the same place, by the same artist. On the terrace of the hotel from which he often painted, only the potted plants had changed. Even before seeing his signature, my heart leapt. Here was yet another window in time, created by the master in residence, Costantino Proietto.

Soon after we published images of the Grayson C.Proietto painting, Mr. Darold Bennett of Las Vegas, Nevada emailed three images of his own C.Proietto. Displayed by his in-laws in their home of sixty years, the family treasure hangs now in Bennett’s home. Remarkably, the Bennett CProietto depicts the same Amalfi Coast location as the previous two. As usual, the artist depicts the Amalfi Coast, with a view to the sea. Of his own Costantino Proietto painting, Darold wrote, “I had a hard time trying figuring out the name too, but it finally came to me that it is ‘C.Proietto’, not ‘C.Preietto’. My in-laws had this painting about 60 years. Are [C.Proietto’s] paintings worth anything?”

The quick answer to Darold’s question is; historically no, but in the future, perhaps. From the limited biography available for the artist, only postwar tourists to Italy purchased his paintings from their source. Since initial purchases were in the 1940’s and 1950’s, many C Proietto paintings are now passing from one generation to the next. In our case, we are third-generation owners of our painting.

In most cases, C.Proietto provenance is hard find. Current owners often know who first owned the painting, yet few details of purchase remain. Although an artist of note could counterfeit his works, recent auctions value an original C.Proietto at or below $1000.  Short of forensic analysis, C.Proietto’s unique signature is the best test of authenticity. I cannot imagine anyone copying that multifaceted signature and making it look right. In an effort to strengthen their provenance, some later C.Proietto paintings had wax seals and other documentation attached.

Bennett’s is the third C Proietto Amalfi Coast painting to surface on the internet in the past month. With such rapid additions to the artist’s known body of work, we wonder how many more examples may exist. We picture many a living room graced by an attractive oil painting depicting a classical Italian scene. Is that the new owner, staring at an enigmatic signature, executed with blue paint so dark that it looks black?

At least one letter in each of the artist’s signatures will be enigmatic, if not indiscernible. Over time, each owner of a C.Proietto painting shall decipher the signature code, conduct a Google search and find that he or she is among friends. If each who discovers their own C.Proietto masterpiece provides us with information on their painting, I shall publish it here.

In Ancient Egypt, Pharaohs appeared as a blend of human and deity, manifested here on Earth. If their god-side was to penetrate eternity, so too must Pharaoh's image. Even today, viewing one of their funerary masks “in person” can send a chill up your spine. In that moment of mutual recognition, we validate another Pharaoh’s quest for eternal life.

On what date Costantino Proietto lifted his final canvas from its easel and sold it to a tourist for a few hundred dollars, we do not know. All we know is that sometime in the second half of the twentieth century, C.Proietto painted his final masterpiece. Each unrecognized painting waits for its owner to decipher to its signature. Like the mask of an ancient Pharaoh looking back at us through time, each locked Costantino Proietto signature awaits its key. In fact, human consciousness is the key to All that Is.

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By James McGillis at 07:12 PM | Fine Art | Comments (4) | Link

Costantino Proietto - Twentieth Century Italian Modern Impressionist - 2011

 

 

Costantino Proietto - Twentieth Century Italian Modern Impressionist 

At Casa Carrie, we own a midcentury original oil painting of Italy's Amalfi Coast hanging in my office. Southeast of Napoli and due west of Sorrento, the Amalfi Coast is famous for the play of light between its Mediterranean sun and sea. In the afternoon, the interplay of direct and reflected sunlight makes the Amalfi Coast perfect for a juxtaposition of seascape and landscape.
 

As I looked around our home, I realized that we have three separate pictures of the Amalfi Coast. The one mentioned above is the masterpiece, with its muted gilt frame, deep textures and sublime light. Adjacent to it is a framed print of a similar scene, painted from a different vantage point. The third is a small, sunny oil painting with lots of color and sailboats heeling in an afternoon breeze.
 

With thousands of Amalfi Coast photographs available through Google Images, It was easy to determine that all three of our images are true to their location, including the headlands and coves that make up the Amalfi Coast. From different locations on the same hill, each artist captured a coastal settlement, clinging to a steep hillside in the middle ground. In each, far mountains come down to the sea, ending in a cliff or in a gentler slope, depending on the artist’s perspective.
 

Although each scene is one that I would gladly place myself within, the C Proietto masterpiece is my favorite. At almost thirty-two inches wide by twenty-three inches high, its foreground includes the terrace of a classical villa. On the right is a long bench, with alcoves receding into its mortared structure. Above the stone bench is the azure blue water of the Mediterranean Sea. Dominating the center of the picture, and receding to the left are three great columns, two of which feature slender grapevines. The vines ascend to an arbor, culminating in a leafy crown. Showing a slight nicotinic haze from many years of exposure to cigarette smoke, our masterpiece still shows us gentle gradations of color, from the ocean to the sky. I now turn my head and view a wonderful depiction of both home and coast.
 

For years, neither Carrie nor I could decipher the signature on our masterpiece. Painted across and into the rough texture of the painting, the artist's name looked more like machine characters at the bottom of a bank check. It seemed that the artist did not care if we could read his splotches of black paint. Or, because of his anticipated fame, he expected us to know who he was. Each night, late in his life, Pablo Picasso would sit at the same table in his favorite cantina. When tourists, who knew he might be there stopped in and asked for an autograph, he agreed to do so, but demanded $10,000 in cash for signatures often scrawled on the back of a menu or on his own bill for dinner. Soon tourist seeking an autograph from Picasso, brought sufficient cash with them to obtain their own original Picasso. Something tells me that most of those buyers were not disappointed with their bargain. Pocketing ten or twenty thousand in cash each night satisfied Papa, as well. Perhaps, CProietto expected to be known by his signature alone.
 

One recent morning, Carrie deciphered the signature on our painting. As I awoke that morning, she said to me, "It's, CProietto”, as if I knew what she was talking about. She had been up early, Googling his name and quickly reaching a dead-end at the pay-for-play art database websites. Apparently, they have not yet discovered that data wants to be free. Perhaps they should check with Google for a new business model. With our artist's name now known, I set out to discover (for free) more about this "Man of Amalfi", Signore C. Proietto.
 

According to Google, there are two matches for the Google search, "artist+CProietto". Carlo Giuseppe Proietto is a contemporary Italian pyrographer of note. The other Costantino Proietto was born in Italy in 1900. According to a terse biography accompanying a German eBay listing for one of his paintings, "He was born in Catania, Sicily, studied at the Florence Academy under Professor Fernando Cappuccio. and lived in Italy". He is listed in the auction data bank ‘ADEC artprice’ under ‘Proietto’.” There are no visual images of the artist that are available on the internet, nor do we know his date or place of death. Despite an well documented body of work, CProietto, is not, as of this writing, included in the Wikipedia ‘List of Italian Painters’. Although most fine art catalog websites are available by subscription only, FineArtInfo.com publicly lists three CProietto paintings sold at auction since 2005, plus one that was unsold as of their posting date. Their prices ranged from $100 to $487.
 

While researching images of the Amalfi Coast, I came across a commercially available poster showing the same terrace as our C Proietto original. The biography accompanying that framed print was as follows: “Danish artist Carl Frederik Aagaard (1833 – 1895) was one of the most influential landscape oil painters of Copenhagen’s Golden Age. Aagaard’s work was so revered, that he was asked to paint King Christian IV’s chapel. Initially a student of drawing at the Danish Royal Academy, he was taught by many of the country’s renowned artists, and was strongly influenced by landscape oil painter Peter Kristian Skoovgaard.”
 

Aagaard’s painting includes the same terrace as our masterpiece, but emphasizes a field of view to the left of C Proietto’s. Costantino Proietto was born in 1900, five years after Aagaard’s death, so their paintings of the Amalfi Coast might differ in age by up to one hundred years. When we merge the edge of Aagaard’s image with that of C Proietto, they blend harmoniously. With the addition of Aagaard's view to the pergola, on the left, two separate images morph together in one continuous scene. To support provenance of both his art and the place, Aagaard later painted a perspective back to the terrace, from the far end of the pergola. For the first time we see, from that perspective, the precipice that we only feel in C Proietto's seascape. According to Aagaard's depiction, access to the terrace and pergola requires a walk up a long and arduous path, all the way from sea level to the summit of this "Angel's Landing" location. When I saw Aagaard's precipice for the first time, I felt a touch of vertigo; as if I had just been there.  The well-defined edge of the terrace and the vastness of the Mediterranean Sea heighten the difference in elevation between the terrace and the sea. C Proietto's sublime terrace scene features a landscape view, while Aagaard features landscape view towards his vanishing point.
 

When a master of the nineteenth century and a master of the twentieth century paint the same scene, from the same terrace, it raises as many questions as it answers. Together they answer the question, “Is this place real?” Aagaard's depiction of the place hints, but does not show that the classical villa exists. Left unanswered are questions about C Proietto’s knowledge of Frederik Aagaard and his earlier painting of the same scene. Since each painter includes the columns supporting an arbor above, we know that it is a central feature of the terrace. If one were to review Carl Frederik Aagaard's many variations on the one depicted here, C Proietto's scene varies in ways one would expect over a century of use. C Proietto includes a low fence between the columns. Did someone get too close and step off into the abyss, thus precipitation additional safety measures?. Since the terrace existed for parts of the past two centuries, might it still stand on that rocky precipice today? Before Aagaard or after Proietto, how many others have hiked that switchback path to sublime light and classical delight?
 

The internet image of Aagaard’s Amalfi Coast painting is too small for us to discern more than its overall artistry. On the far left of Aagaard's Amalfi Coast painting, his doorway to infinity tells us that he understood the concept of a vanishing point. Leaving these side mysteries for another day, I did not conduct further research into Aagaard’s other works or the prices that they fetch at auction. Costantino Proietto, on the other hand, we know as a twentieth century artist who combined both modern and impressionistic elements in his Italian seascapes and other water-related scenes.
 

Costantino Proietto created lasting art that graces our home and perhaps many others around the world. The low auction prices that C Proietto oil paintings now command reflect his relatively unknown status, rather than the quality of his work. In my opinion, if he were better known, his paintings would be more highly prized than the $100 - $500 indicated by recent auction prices . Although we do not yet know his date of death, nor do we have a picture of him, we hope that this article will stimulate interest in both the artist and his works. Someone may read this article, walk into his or her study as I did, only to discover that their seascape is a C Proietto original, or maybe a Carl Frederik Aagaard original.
 

In order for the world to appreciate Costantino Proietto as a great Modern Impressionist, we need more information about his art and his life. If any reader has additional images or biographical information to share, we would be happy to post it here. If you have knowledge that will help solve an ongoing twentieth century art mystery, please leave a comment at the bottom of this article or send your images via email. All information posted will include proper attribution, in accordance with the provider’s wishes.
 

Ciao

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By James McGillis at 01:01 AM | Fine Art | Comments (6) | Link