Attilio Salemme (1911-1955) was an American artist best known for his colorful, geometric paintings and works on paper, which juxtapose elongated vertical rectangles in complex relationships that suggest figural groups or “presences.”

Born near Boston, MA, Salemme supported his mother and sister from a very young age upon his father’s passing. After leaving school to take care of them, Salemme eventually joined the Marines. Back in New York City in 1930 in the first years of the Depression, Salemme found assorted jobs to support himself, his mother and sister. He started to think seriously of art as a career while living in the artistic milieu of Greenwich Village, though he had a conflicting interest in science. He met his wife and other artists when he got a job as a framer in 1942 at the precursor of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Guggenheim Museum of Non-Objective Art. He was taken by the city’s rich museum collections, especially antiquities from ancient Italy and Greece. He had a notable preoccupation with classicism and studied Greco-Roman culture and history, whose influence he melded with his unique form of precisionist symbolism. According to his wife Lucia Salemme, he was always reaching back to the past to situate his thoughts on the present. He counted Marcel Duchamp and Alexander Calder among close friends, as well as Milton Avery, a fellow framer.

Salemme died of a heart attack in 1955, and his paintings would soon be acknowledged for their surreal and metaphysical qualities. His work can be found in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. Salemme was the subject a posthumous retrospective exhibition at the Whitney in the spring of 1959.