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ALAN FELTUS

(American-Italian, born 1943)

SEATED DANCERS

Lithograph on Paper

21¼ x 29¼ Inches

Signed Lower Center, "Alan Evan Feltus"

Dated 1980 and with Number and Limitation, "44/60"

 

Alan Feltus, born in Washington DC, is a figurative painter of contemporary classicism, which is rooted iconically in artwork of the Italian Renaissance but has a timeless, melancholy aspect related to Modernism. His fascination with the Italian Old Masters and the culture of Italy inspired him in 1987 to buy a farm near Assisi, Italy and became a full-time resident there.

 

His figural subjects, often depicted in pairs in interior settings, usually have dark hair, simple clothing, "downturned mouths and sideways glances" with limbs that are "almost sculpturally smooth and characteristically bent into intriguing puzzlelike patterns.... unspecified narratives hover in the air, and the inhabitants seem lost in their own separate worlds of memory" (American Arts Quarterly, 54-55). Feltus does not paint from models and rarely shows objects in his interior settings. He says that his images are a combination of realism and imagination, "intuitive by nature.... What I paint comes from within myself. I use mirrors to observe various parts of my own face or body to understand structure. ... Every form in a painting is given a gesture. ...I want to find the most perfect visual arrangement of form I can find" (Feltus 56-57).

 

Feltus first studied at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia from 1961 to 1962 and at Cooper Union in New York City, where he received his BFA in 1966. In 1968, he earned his MFA from Yale University. Over the course of a distinguished career, Feltus has been the recipient of numerous prizes, medals and juried awards including The Prix de Rome for study at the American Academy in Rome, 1970 to 1972; a Tiffany Foundation Grant in 1980; a grant from the National Foundation for the Arts in 1981; and, in 1982, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. His work is held in private and public collections including the permanent collections of the National Academy of Design in New York, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Smithsonian Art Museum in Washington, D.C. and the Huntington Museum of Art, among others.

 

Reference:

Editors, "Exhibitions-Alan Feltus", American Arts Quarterly, Fall 2005, pp. 54-55, 58; Paul Feltus, "The Composition of Paintings: An Artists Perspective", American Arts Quarterly, Fall 2005, pp. 55-57; Who's Who in American Art, 2003-2004, p. 370-371; et al.