Louis Bosa (1905-1981)
Bosa showed early art talent and interest, and began to do figure paintings, using his family as models, by the age of ten. When he was fifteen years old, he enrolled in Venice at the Academia delle Belle Arti. He then emigrated to America. He studied at the Art Students League whose Director was the Social-Realist painter John Sloan. Sloan's painting style and subject matter had an ongoing influence on Bosa.
In 1944 he won a $1500 prize for painting from the Pepsi-Cola Company. In 1938, he won the first award that brought him much attention, the John Wanamaker Prize at an outdoor exhibition in Washington Square.
In the 1930s Bosa purchased a dilapidated cabin, built 1730, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and the cabin, named Casa Bosa, was his summer home for many years and after retirement, their permanent home. In an addition to the original structure, Bosa created a room resembling a chapel in which he housed small sculptures that he had made and Renaissance religious sculptures that he had collected.
Amidst the growing trends of modernism, especially Abstract Expressionism, he kept to his own unique style of apolitical, witty character studies and subjects of humor and human pathos. For art historians, his work has been difficult to categorize, which has led to him getting less attention than many of his contemporaries.
Source: AskArt |
