Dante Raphael Giglio, better known as Giglio Dante, was an Italian-born American painter. Dante was an active painter for over six decades. His roots started in Boston, Massachusetts, with a group of other emerging artists later known as the Boston Expressionists. Giglio Dante can be seen pictured alongside his contemporaries in ARTnews, which published a John Brook portrait of eleven Boston painters including Karl Zerbe, Reed Champion, Ture Bengtz, Maud Morgan, Kahlil Gibran, Esther Geller, Carl Pickhardt, John Northey, Thomas Fransioli, and Lawrence Kupferman.
Biography
Giglio Dante came to Boston from Rome in 1921. His father, a respected muralist, trained him in the classical techniques of oil-tempera and fresco. Considered a teenage prodigy, Dante started painting portraits and murals at a young age. In the mid-1930s when working for the W.P.A., he was commissioned to paint two murals, depicting working Italian immigrants, at the Michelangelo School located on Charter Street in Boston. The murals were not without controversy as some residents considered the depiction of Italians as unhappy laborers. Many of his early paintings show the influence of Rouault and Picasso. It was at this time he broke with his father in his portrait work and the traditions of a classical painter and became and an active member in the Boston Expressionists Movement. The Sgraffito technique with semi-abstract symbolism was widely used by Dante in the 1930s and 40s. He exhibited at the famous Boris Mirski Gallery and taught classes at the Mirski school of Art. He was also part of the dramatic Abstract Expressionist Movement in New York during the mid 1940s and 50s. He contributed to the Provincetown art colony during this period and was one of two founders of Studio Five, a collective artist studio, with sculptor Kenneth Campbell. Dante showed his work in Boston and New York City during the 1940s and moved permanently to New York in the 1950s. He became part of the Betty Parson Gallery for 10 years and sold with the likes of Mark Rothko, Hans Hofmann, and Barnett Newman. He was one of the first artists to move into the Westbeth Artists Community in 1970 where he exhibited in their major shows. It was during this period he started with the abstract sculpture technique of Assemblage. He started dividing his time during the mid 1970s between Westbeth NYC and East Hampton, NY. He finally moved permanently to East Hampton in 1981. Dante continued painting and in 1986 he won Best in Show at Guild Hall's Annual Artist Members Exhibition for his mixed media work of “Portrait of Contessa V.” Giglio Dante died at age 92 on December 12, 2006. He is buried along with his wife in the Green River Cemetery of Long Island NY.
