PEPPINO MANGRAVITE (1896-1978)
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Biography • Peppino Mangravite (1896-1978)
Peppino Mangravite was born in Lipari, Italy, a small island off the northern coast of Sicily where his father, an Italian naval officer, was stationed. Mangravite traveled to Carrara on the Italian mainland to study art. Upon his father’s retirement from the navy in 1912 the family moved to New York. In 1914 Mangravite became an art student at the Cooper Union Art School and by 1917 he was studying with Robert Henri at the Art Students League.
Mangravite began to teach at the Hansen School of Fine Arts in New York City in 1919. He also earned income in the early 1920s as an assistant to a decorator of church interiors. In 1926, he went on to teach at the Potomac School in Washington, DC and then at the Ethical Cultural School in New York in 1928. Mangravite had a long career as a teacher, working at such institutions as Sarah Lawrence School (1930-35), Colorado Springs Fine Art Center (1937-38), Cooper Union Art School (1937-42), Art Students League (1940-1941), Art Institute of Chicago (1940-42), and Columbia University (1942-64). Mangravite was fortunate to earn a living as a teacher, which enabled him to pursue his own painting. Mangravite began to paint Adirondack subjects in the 1920s when he married Frances Teall, daughter of Adirondack newspaper woman Edna West Teall. The Mangravites bought a large farm near Elizabethtown which is still owned by the artist’s daughter.
Mangravite was awarded a gold medal for a mural at the 1926 Sesqui-centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. He had two solo exhibitions at the prestigious Dudensing Galleries in New York in 1929 and 1931. In 1934 Mangravite began to exhibit at the Frank Rehn Gallery in New York, where he had many one-man exhibitions (1934, 1937, 1944, 1951, 1953, 1959, 1961). Between 1929 and 1932 Mangravite experimented with his own unique style. He soon realized that painterly fluidity and lyrical themes interested him most. Mangravite received Guggenheim Fellowships in 1932 and 1935. In 1938 he was invited to exhibit at the Venice Biennale in Italy. In 1939 he exhibited at the New York World’s Fair and the Golden Gate Exposition, taking prizes at both. While an instructor at the Art Institute of Chicago, Mangravite had a solo exhibition at the museum in 1941. As a WPA artist, Mangravite won many mural commissions. He executed murals for the Post Offices in Hempstead, Long Island, 1936, Atlantic City, 1939, and Jackson Heights, Queens, 1940. Mangravite executed a mural for the Governor’s Mansion in the Virgin Islands in 1942. In the late 1940s Mangravite exhibited at many prestigious museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Carnegie Institute, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Mangravite traveled to Europe in 1955 on behalf of Columbia University and the State Department to interview some of the outstanding artists of the day. During this visit he spoke with abstract artists like Braque, Chagall and de Chirico. With Mangravite’s official retirement from teaching at Columbia in 1964 he had more time to paint, and took full advantage of it. Mangravite died in 1978 in Cornwall, Connecticut.