Antonio Frasconi (Uruguayan-American 1919-2013)

An illustrator, painter and print maker, Antonio Frasconi would become best known for his book illustrations.  He was born in 1919 in Montevideo, Uruguay but spent most of his career in America where he worked in New York City and lived in Norwalk, Connecticut.

His parents had emigrated from Italy to Uruguay during World War I and Antonio Frasconi grew up in Montevideo.  By age twelve he was apprenticing at a local print makers, and soon thereafter began publishing his cartoons in satirical newspapers.  In the 1940s Frasconi began experimenting with woodcuts in the 1940s, and in 1945 he received a scholarship from the Art Students' League, and moved to New York to begin his formal education.  He also studied at the New School of Social Research.

By the 1950s he had become widely recognized as a leading graphic artist, especially in woodblock printing.  He married artist Leona Pierce in 1951, and in 1955 published See and Say, A Picture Book in Four Languages, for their son. Over the course of the next fifty years he would illustrate and design over 100 books including the poems of Langston Hughes: Let America be America Again and Pablo Neruda’s Bestiary/Bestiario; On the Slain Collegians, the images of America’s Vietnam, A Whitman Portrait and Twelve Fables of Aesop.

The dictatorship in Uruguay was long and hard, finally coming to an end in 1985, four years after the artist began work on his magnum opus, Los Desaparecidos, or The Disappeared, a series of woodcuts and monotypes.  Dark, graphically strong, and echoing the book format,  Frasconi’s art successfully portrays the horrors of torture, incarceration, and killing while specifically preserving the memory of real people.

Exhibitions included:

Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1953 (Joseph Pennell Memorial  medal)

Venice Film Festival, 1960 and 1968 (Grand Prix) 

Casa Americas, Havana, Cuba, 1965-68 (prize)

Art of the Americas, Yale University

Smithsonian Institution Institute

Whitney Museum of American Art 

Sources: 

Annex Galleries

Peter Hastings Falk, Editor, Who Was Who in American Art