Letterio Calapai

Letterio Calapai, known to friends as Leo, was a painter and renowned printmaker whose works commented on social, religious, and literary themes while depicting laborers in urban settings, rural landscape, and non-objective designs. At the apex of his printmaking career, Calapai came to Buffalo in 1949 at the behest of Philip C. Elliot to become the founding director of graphic arts at the Albright Art School, which later formed the nucleus of the Art Department when it transitioned to the University of Buffalo. He stayed until 1955. Following his six years here, he taught at the New School for Social Research in New York.

Born in Boston, Calapai studied at the Massachusetts School of Art and at the School of Fine Arts and Crafts in Boston. He came to New York City in 1928, studied at the Art Students League, and later enjoyed success with the Works Progress Administration (WPA). He created portfolios and illustrated books of social and religious concern, among them The Negro Bible Series, supported in a recent reprint by Cornel West, and How God Fix Jonah, with a foreword by W. E. B. Du Bois. Stuart Preston, art critic for The New York Times, described this work of the 1940s as “cataclysmic...scenes, emotional in color, form and design.” His work is held by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Crystal Bridges, and university museums, among them Harvard, Michigan, Ohio, Syracuse and University of Rochester. His work is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Fogg Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Library of Congress, New York Public Library, and other important collections.

In 1948, Calapai produced 25 prints for Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel with an introduction by Franz Schoenberner that described the artist’s new, unique multi-media process “to make visual the most intrinsic relationship between the poetic phrase and its graphic paraphrase.”  Created in stages with different printmaking techniques. The calligraphic text was etched and “printed from a copper plate in terra cotta (in the manner of a woodblock).” It “became an organic entity” once it was combined with the illustrative wood engraving. Both were enclosed in a terra cotta printed frame. Schoenberner compared the technique, which also incorporated embossing, to “the rubbings taken from the bas-relief tombs and stone engravings of the early Chinese (Han Period). However, it differs in that it was made a positive rather than a negative form of the original.” He also cited William Blake’s 18^th-century work “combined design and calligraphy in his engravings.”