Michael De Lisio, American (1912-2003) New York, USA
New York Times Obituary:
Michael de Lisio, 91, Sculptor Who Turned Photos Into Statues
By Roberta Smith, February 2, 2003
Michael de Lisio, a sculptor and poet, died on Jan. 21 in Manhattan, one day short of his 92nd birthday.
Mr. de Lisio was born in Manhattan. His parents were Italian immigrants, and he was largely self-taught. He had minor success as a poet, publishing sporadically in little magazines as well as in Scribner’s and The New Yorker.
After serving in the United States Navy during World War II, he worked for two decades in public relations, mostly for MGM. In 1965, at 54, he turned to sculpture. Working in painted terra cotta as well as in bronze, he began making small, seemingly quaint yet psychologically telling portraits of the writers and artists he admired and sometimes knew personally.
His depictions usually took well-known photographs startlingly into three dimensions, like Barbara Morgan’s famous 1940 image of Martha Graham with her torso pitched forward and her long gown sweeping upward like an open fan.
Other subjects included W. H. Auden, Janet Flanner, Truman Capote and Virgil Thomson, who were friends, as well as Emily Dickinson, Henry James, Marsden Hartley, Alfred Stieglitz and Toulouse-Lautrec. He also made a group portrait of Sylvia Beach and writers who congregated at her bookshop, Shakespeare & Company, in Paris in the 1920’s and 30’s.Mr. de Lisio had solo shows at the Nova Scotia College of Art in Halifax (1969); the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (1971); the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Mass. (1973); and the Smith College Museum of Art in Northampton, Mass. (1974 and 1980).
He had New York gallery shows at Brooke Alexander in 1978 and Zabriskie in 1986 and a retrospective at Boston College in 1998. His works are in the collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, the Addison Gallery, Boston College and the Smith College Museum of Art.
Mr. de Lisio’s companion, the journalist, editor and collector Irving Drutman, died in 1978.
Because of failing eyesight, Mr. de Lisio returned to poetry in his last decade, working in a style as understated and compressed as his sculpture:
“The charisma of 90
can be undone
by slowly becoming
91″.
www.nytimes.com/2003/02/02/nyregion/michael-de-lisio-91-sculptor-who-turned-photos-into-statues.html
https://www.bc.edu/sites/artmuseum/exhibitions/artlit/
Auction results: https://auctions.stairgalleries.com/lot/michael-delisio-1911-2003-portrait-of-virgil-thomson-3902101