Medium: Oil
Support: Canvasboard
Artist: Gustave Cimiotti Jr.
Artist Dates: 1875 - 1969
Country of Origin: United States of America
Title & Description: Painting depicts the Mission San Antonio de Pala. Verso is inscribed " Pala Mission California Gustave Cimiotti 51 West 10 st NY."
Signature: "Cimiotti" lower left
Date of Work: Early 20th Century
Frame: Period
Work Size: 16" H x 20" W
Frame Size: 22" H x 26" W x 2" D
Weight: 7 pounds
Condition: No restorations.
Meta: painting, California art
Artist Biography: The distinctive landscapes of Gustave Cimiotti, with their simplicity of composition, their boldness and special clarity of light, and their use of broad, regularized forms and full range of values, set him apart from many late American impressionists and other plein-air painters who adopted the French aesthetic from Claude Monet and the circle at Giverny. Cimiotti’s ancestors lived in Northern Italy but Gustave’s branch of the family came from Austria. His father, Gustave, Sr. emigrated to America and entered the furrier trade. Gustave, Jr.’s childhood was spent in Verona, New Jersey in the summer and New York City in the winter. When he was sixteen, Gustave was already producing watercolors of note and he was studying piano. Around the age of twenty, Gustave Cimiotti gave up a potential career as a concert pianist to study art and he enrolled in the Art Students League (1895-98), where he demonstrated an amazing talent for figure drawing. Then Cimiotti sailed for Paris in the summer of 1899. On 8 October he was in the Académie Julian but frequently went to the outdoors for subject matter, while in the evenings he practiced his music lessons. After a mini-Grand Tour to Italy, Switzerland, and the Low Countries, Cimiotti returned to America in October 1900. The following summer he was sketching en plein air in the Delaware River Valley. In 1901, Cimiotti opened a studio in New York City, which had become a kind of proving ground for radical new Parisian movements. He exhibited Above the Dale at the Corcoran Gallery in 1907. Cimiotti would exhibit on a regular basis at the National Academy of Design, and with the Society of American Artists. His first solo show was at the Bauer-Folsom Galleries in December 1908. Critics admired the uncluttered simplicity of his style and high-keyed palette that he learned while in France: “a certain refreshing brightness.” (New York Globe, 3 December 1908). Meanwhile, Cimiotti made visits to the studio of Albert Pinkham Ryder and was influenced significantly by his ideas of composition in large masses, and by his bold use of the palette knife. Cimiotti took part in the Armory Show in 1913, organized by the avant-garde Association of American Painters and Sculptors, and he became a member of the New York Water Color Club, where he served on the jury, and the Salmagundi Club. In 1914, Cimiotti participated in a show of Salmagundi Club members at the Art Club of Philadelphia, where the critic for the Chicago Examiner, H. Effa Webster, praised Cimiotti’s mastery of color, his decorative elements, his vision, and intensity of imagination. During the 1920s, Cimiotti exhibited widely, and by this time, he was painting in a broad, vigorous manner associated with that decade. Writers on art found a decorative quality in his art and admired his highly saturated pigment as well as his individual expression.From 1928 to 1936, Cimiotti taught landscape painting at the Berkshire Summer School of Art in Monterey, Massachusetts, and between 1935 and 1943, he directed the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Art, where he had been a faculty member. Cimiotti’s canvases were featured in an exhibition that December at the National Gallery of Art. Cimiotti saw art as “a magnificent intellectual fabric unraveled from the realities of our lives” and visualized a society improved by subjugating greed and promoting art education. For Cimiotti, the artist had to invest something of himself in every creative work and at the same time, remain universal. In late 1943, Cimiotti moved to Laguna Beach, California where he took in interest in painting flowers and attempted to sell his works, then returned to New York City in 1945. He continued to teach and exhibit until his death at the age of ninety-three in 1969.