Resting Athlete (1938) by Luigi Lucioni (1900-1988), Oil/Canvas

Lucioni was born Giuseppe Luigi Carlo Benevenuto Lucioni in Malante, Italy. His father was a coppersmith. Lucioni began drawing as a young child. In 1911, his family immigrated to the USA. After being quarantined for nine days in the sweltering August heat in NY Harbor along with 350 other third class passengers due to a cholera report, his ship landed at the 34th Street pier and the family was transferred to Ellis Island. The family then moved to a small one bedroom apartment on Christopher Street in Manhattan, where he lived with his parents and three sisters. Lucioni spent four years learning English on the streets of NYC, and he was not placed in first grade until he was 11-years-old. American life was initially difficult for him. He endured bigotry from the neighborhood children who called him a “guinea wop”.

He never graduated from high school, but was accepted at Cooper Union when he was 15-years old, taking evening classes while working at a Brooklyn engraving company during the day. When he was 19-years-old, Lucioni entered NYC’s National Academy Of Design, and at 21-years old, he received a Tiffany Foundation Fellowship to study in Italy.

In 1932, he became the youngest person to have a painting purchased Metropolitan Museum Of Art.

He lived and worked in a townhouse at 33 West 10th Street in NYC and at a farmhouse in Manchester, Vermont in the summers. He was what they used to call a “lifelong confirmed bachelor”. He loved opera and painted portraits of many opera stars. Lucioni was romantically involved with famed gay artist Paul Cadmus; they probably met as students, and they shared acquaintances in NYC’s circle of gay artists and writers like Jared French, George Platt Lynes, and Lincoln Kirstein.

Luigi Lucioni standing next to portrait of Donald Sultner-Welles, photograph by Sultner-Welles, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution