LAZZARI, PIETRO (Italian/ American, 1898-1979)

Lazzari began his professional education in his hometown Rome, when he apprenticed himself to the sculptor Jerace. Though his studies were interrupted by World War I, he later distinguished himself in the national competition, Pensionato Italiano di Pitture and earned the degree of Master Artist at the Ornamental School of Rome. He shared in the futurist movement with Marinetti, Bragaglia, Balla, Boccioni, and Severini. After having lived and worked in Paris for a while he had his first solo exhibition of oil paintings at the Theatre of the Independents in Rome.
After the rise of Fascism, Lazzari left for the United States, where he lived for forty years. He was one of nine Europeans - among them Gauguin, Modigliani, Pascin, Picasso and Rousseau - who showed together in 1926 at the New Gallery in New York.
During the 1930s Lazzari became a United States citizen. He had a studio in New York where he worked as a fresco painter for the Works Progress Administration; he researched in grounds and media and developed a method of casting sculpture in coloured concrete. He had several one-man shows and exhibited in major group shows including the pioneer exhibition Abstract Art in America at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In this decade, he also won awards in a number of art competitions sponsored by the Section of Fine Arts, U.S. Treasury Department and executed murals in several Federal buildings.
In the 1940s Lazzari moved his studio to Washington D.C. and took employment in the war effort. He participated in the National Artists For Victory exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art where he showed his life-size polychrome concrete sculpture ‘Bleeding Civilian’.
In 1950 Lazzari was awarded a Fullbright Fellowship for research in ancient art techniques.
During the 1960s Lazzari committed himself to portraits in bronze of the great humanitarians of his time. In 1966 he produced a head of Pope Paul VI, the only sculpture of the Pope which was done directly from life and with the official permission of the Vatican. Lazzari’s bust of Eleanor Roosevelt is in the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park and his sculpture of Norman Thomas is at the Debs Museum at Terre Haute, Indiana.

Through the years Lazzari has had numerous one-man shows in the United States and Europe. He has shown in major exhibitions at museums such as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Boston Museum, the Cleveland Museum, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the Museum of Modern art in New York.

Public collections include:
Art Institute, Chicago
Miami Museum of Modern Art
Smithsonian Institution
Washington Gallery of Modern Art
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York