Allan D'Arcangelo

Acquired directly from the artist

Marco Livingstone, Pop Art: A Continuing History, New York, 1990, p. 84, illustrated in color
Sidra Stitch, Made in U.S.A.: An Americanization in Modern Art, the '50s and '60s, Berkeley, 1987, p. 31, illustrated
David McCarthy, Movements in Modern Art, Boston, 2000, p. 50, illustrated in color

This work is in good condition overall. There is evidence of light wear and handling at the edges. There is evidence of scattered fine craquelure particularly concentrated in the white stars located at the pull margins. There is a fine stretcher bar impression along the lower edge and a 1/8 inch protrusion in the canvas where the left and bottom stretcher bars unevenly meet, located along the left edge two inches from the bottom. There are several scattered liquid accretions – the largest.mes asuring approximately 1 ½ inch in diameter located 22 inches from the right and 26 ½ inches from the top; several accretions fluoresce under ultraviolet light. Ultraviolet light inspection does not reveal any restoration. Framed.
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Allan D'Arcangelo's importance within the Pop Art canon is distinctly appreciable through his striking depictions of traffic signs, media icons and the vastness of the insular American highways.  During a career that spanned over 40 years, D'Arcangelo's hard edge Pop vision tapped deeply into the American subconscious and is among the genre's most original and memorable compositions. The present work, American Madonna #1, 1962 stands as one of the artist's most important works and is truly an icon of the American Pop-Art movement. Painted the same year as Warhol's seminal Marilyn and Lichtenstein's Masterpiece, the present work reflects Pop-Art's most fundamental tenets.  Moreover, like the aforementioned works, through countless reproductions, D'Arcangelo's masterpiece has attained nearly iconic status within the realm of popular culture.  The composition itself reveals a naked woman, tellingly haloed in gold, posing provocatively before a backwards American flag.  Beneath her the artist renders cropped heads of the ubiquitous farmer couple in Grant Wood's masterpiece American Gothic, 1930. The subversive juxtaposition encapsulates D'Arcangelo's view of the impact of America's culture, exposing its true and often contradictory nature. Here, the artist illustrates the new nature of America's cultural prowess; Pop sexuality wrapped in a dark brunette facade. In D'Arcangelo's eyes, this powerful mentality had literally and figuratively supplanted the traditional concept of the Red, White and Blue: the apple-pie eating, crop-growing country of Grant Wood. No more would traditional subjects be worthy of the white-walls of museums and galleries. Indeed, like Warhol's Marilyn and Lichtenstein's Masterpiece, with American Madonna #1, 1962 D'Arcangelo created a symbol of the new Pop order in art in spectacular fashion.