Salvatore Pinto: A Retrospective Celebrating the Barnes Legacy (May 12-July 15) looks back on the career of one of Philadelphia’s great 20th-century artists, who studied at the Barnes Foundation.
Part of a family of artists who moved to Philadelphia from Italy in 1909, Salvatore Pinto (1905-1966) was a prized student of Albert Barnes and a teacher at the Barnes Foundation, transmitting ideas of European modernism to generations of American art students. Pinto, who attended the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art (now the University of the Arts) and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, absorbed the latest trends of avant-garde painting from mentors like Henri Matisse, with whom Pinto studied in the South of France on a Barnes Foundation Travelling Scholarship. Working in media ranging from painting and printmaking to photography and furniture design, Pinto embraced what he learned from his travels abroad and developed a distinctly American repertoire of subjects, including a series inspired by Long Beach Island shorelines. Coinciding with the opening of the Barnes Foundation on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Salvatore Pinto: A Retrospective Celebrating the Barnes Legacy offers a comprehensive view of Pinto’s oeuvre, with examples of works by his brothers Angelo and Biagio, to honor an essential transatlantic link between Philadelphia and European modernism.
