He was temperamental, once knocking Jack Kerouac down because the author insulted an opera singer. Angelo DiBenedetto was gifted, outspoken and opinionated, and always listed as one of America’s foremost artists in the 20th century. When he lived in the interior of Haiti for 19 months, he was initiated into the voodoo cult. His chosen home, far from the collectors and galleries and museums that bought his creations, was a tiny Victorian town with one gravel road reaching it.
This son of Italian immigrants was published in Life Magazine to critical acclaim in his 20s, but his second painting for Life was banned in three counties in Massachusetts. Born in New Jersey in 1913, Angelo earned an art degree with honors from the Cooper Union Art School and a scholarship to Boston Museum School of Fine Arts.
Angelo DiBenedetto
Honors, one-man shows and “Best of” shows all attested to Angelo’s artistic abilities. His paintings were featured in many magazines: the New Yorker, Newsweek, Holiday, Art News, Art Digest, Fortune, Smithsonian magazine and even the Encyclopedia Britannica. His sculptures were exhibited in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Smithsonian, Denver Art Museum and the Museum of New Mexico. Most are in private collections across the country.
His best-known contemporary sculpture legacy is Burns Park at the corner of South Colorado Boulevard and East Alameda Avenue. Angelo was the leader in the then-revolutionary drive for more modern sculptures in public open spaces. The first city to embrace his vision was Denver. Angelo recruited eight other contemporary artists to join him in creating modern sculptures for Burns Park in 1967. He organized “Art for the Cities” and 22 other cities also beautified their open space with contemporary sculptures. Because of his leadership in the movement he was asked to serve as a consultant for the Department of the Interior, which stated, “He was responsible for the unique position Colorado holds as the state with more outdoor sculpture than any of the other forty-nine.”
The most dramatic and largest mural in America was sadly lost this year when the state of Colorado razed the Judicial Building.
Sauer-McShane warehouse
In 1976, the Colorado Judicial Department held a contest to choose an artist to paint a huge mural for the ceiling of the breezeway of the new Colorado Judicial Building. From the 22 finalists, they chose Angelo. He had studied mural painting at Harvard University and later in Mexico with Diego Rivera and had painted many murals in the two countries. But this was the largest mural in America at 300 feet long and 10 feet high, a whopping 3,000 square feet. The 74 panels created for the mural each weighed 100 pounds and were made of cement asbestos, an inert material that wouldn’t attack the paint. (The asbestos probably contributed, along with his lifelong smoking habit, to his death from cancer in 1992.)
He hired six other artists as assistants and two years later, the murals were dedicated on Oct. 12, 1978. Sixty historical figures, representing justice and human rights through all ages, were chosen by Angelo; they included both genders and all races and cultures.
Other honors accorded Angelo:
• Shows at the National Gallery of Art, the Corcoran Biennial Exhibit in Washington, D.C., the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, Pa., the Whitney Museum in New York, the Chicago Art Institute and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.
• Exhibits in more than 100 museums in the U.S. and Europe.
• More than 20 one-man gallery shows.
• Inclusion in every list of “foremost American artists” in the last half of the 20th century. Artists declared “He must be included in any list of those who set the direction of art in the mid-20th century in America.”
• Guest lecturer at the University of Colorado at Denver, the University of Denver and Colorado College.
• Two honorary degrees bestowed by the University of Colorado.
Circles dominated DiBenedetto’s late art, including this simplistic piece, Orange on Orange #4
Always an agitator for individual rights, Angelo was the leader in promoting royalties for artists when their works sold again at inflated prices. He was the first, in 1946, to include a contract with his sales that specified royalties in the event of resale or reproduction.
But this “foremost American artist” chose to live in a remote town, far from the center of the art world in the northeast U.S. Always intensely patriotic, Angelo had volunteered for World War II. The Army tapped his training as a cartographer and sent him first to Ethiopia on a secret assignment and eventually to Buckley Field in Denver. The course of his life changed when he first saw Central City.
Angelo said Central City “looked like an empty little Swiss town.” He promptly fell in love with the town, which at that time had one gravel road to it, and moved there in 1946 with his then-wife and small daughter. The huge, run-down Sauer-McShane warehouse on Spring Street intrigued him. The three-story stone warehouse, built in 1886, contained 10,000 square feet of space. He purchased it with his discharge pay and spent six years shoveling out the mud and boulders that had rolled in from the hillside. He leased out the first floor and lived on the upper two floors, reveling in the high ceilings and huge open space. His studio/living area was so cavernous that once he created a retrospective of his art more than 30 years for an NBC television special inside his house. One of his proudest creations was his kitchen table, made from a large packing box. Visitors were encouraged to carve their autographs on the table and scores of famous visitors, such as Gypsy Rose Lee, Helen Hayes and Mae West did so.
To say Angelo was active in Central City politics is putting it mildly. He served on the Council, ran for mayor and passionately fought an unending battle to insure the historical integrity of the town. He served on the board of the Gilpin County Historical Society for years and ardently pursued the restoration of the Coeur d’Alene Mine and saving Locomotive 71 for the city.
Over a 14-year period in the latter 20th century, circles came to dominate his art. When the popular Central City Jazz Festival began, he became an honorary member of the board and always donated a unique circle logo. Eventually his circles evolved to welded wire sculptures and three-dimensional abstract canvases and sculptures, many of them expressing his revulsion to war.
