Anthony Velonis

Anthony Velonis (23 October 1911 – 29 October 1997) was an American painter and designer born in New York City who helped introduce the public to silkscreen printing in the early 20th century.

He married Elizabeth Amidon, with whom he had four children.

While employed under the federal Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression, Velonis brought the use of silkscreen printing as a fine art form, referred to as the "serigraph," into the mainstream.

By his own request, he was not publicly credited for coining the term.

He experimented and mastered techniques to print on a wide variety of materials, such as glass, plastics, and metal, thereby expanding the field.

In the mid to late 20th century, the silkscreen technique became popular among other artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol.

Velonis was born into a relatively poor background of a Greek immigrant family and grew up in the tenements of New York City.

Early on, he took creative inspiration from figures in his life such as his grandfather, an immigrant from the mountains in Greece, who was "an ecclesiastical painter, on Byzantine style."

The eldest of four children, Velonis attended James Monroe High School in The Bronx, where he took on minor artistic roles such as the illustration of his high school yearbook.

He eventually received a scholarship to the NYU College of Fine Arts, into which he was both surprised and ecstatic to have been admitted.

Around this time he took to painting, watercolor, and sculpture, as well as various other art forms, hoping to find a niche that fit.

He attended NYU until 1929, when the Great Depression started in the United States after the stock market crash.

Around the year 1932, Velonis became interested in silk screen, together with fellow artist Fritz Brosius, and decided to investigate the practice.

Working in his brother's sign shop, Velonis was able to master the silkscreen process.

He reminisced in an interview three decades later that doing so was "plenty of fun," and that a lot of technology can be discovered through hard work, more so if it is worked on "little by little."

Velonis was hired by Mayor LaGuardia in 1934 to promote the work of New York's city government via posters publicizing city projects.

One such project required him to go on a commercial fishing trip to locations including New Bedford and Nantucket for a fortnight, where he primarily took photographs and notes, and made sketches.

Afterward, for a period of roughly six months, he was occupied with creating paintings from these records.

During this trip, Velonis developed true respect and affinity for the fishermen with whom he traveled, "the relatively uneducated person," in his words.

Following this, Velonis began work with the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), an offshoot of the Civil Works Administration (CWA), where he was assigned to serve the different city departments of New York.

After the formation of the federal Works Progress Administration, which hired artists and sponsored projects in the arts, he also worked in theater.

Velonis began working for the federal WPA in 1935.

He kept this position until 1936 or 1938, at which point he began working in the graphic art division of the Federal Art Project, which he ultimately led.

Under the leadership of Velonis, "The team of six artists at the Graphic Arts Division who pioneered new screen-print technologies included Harry Gottlieb, Louis Lozowick, Eugene Morley, Elizabeth Olds, and Hyman Warsager".

Under various elements of the WPA program, many young artists, writers and actors gained employment that helped them survive during the Depression, as well as contributing works that created an artistic legacy for the country.

Around 1937 –1939, Velonis wrote a pamphlet titled "Technical Problems of the Artist: Technique of the Silkscreen Process," which was distributed to art centers run by the WPA around the country.

It was considered very influential in encouraging artists to try this relatively inexpensive technique and stimulated printmaking across the country.

Art historian Mary Francey wrote, "The demand for the two instructional manuals Velonis wrote that described the process in detail was so great that mimeographed copies were made available to artists nationwide. Because it required simple, inexpensive equipment, screen printing had immediate and widespread appeal. More important, artists printed their own images, thereby re-establishing the direct relationship between idea and process that intervention by master printers in etching and lithography had altered."

Two examples of Velonis’s screen prints, including 6:30 p.m. (1938), which was executed as a bravura demonstration of the medium to convince W.P.A. administrators that the technique was suited to the creation of fine prints, and Half-ton Fish (1938), appear in the exhibition.

Velonis was dedicated to disseminating the screen print process to American printmakers, many of whom made their first screen prints in the workshops sponsored by the Federal Art Project."

As he recalled in a 1965 interview:

"'I suggested that the Poster division would be a lot more productive and useful if they had an auxiliary screen printing project that worked along with them. And apparently this was very favorably received...'"

As a member of the Federal Art Project, a subdivision of the WPA, Velonis later approached the Public Use of Arts Committee (PUAC) for help in "propagandizing for art in the parks, in the subways, et cetera."

Since the Federal Art Project could not be "self-promoting," an outside organization was required to advertise their art more extensively.

During his employment with the Federal Art Project, Velonis created nine silkscreen posters for the federal government.

When interviewed in December 1994 by the Library of Congress about his time in the WPA, Velonis reflected that he had greatly enjoyed that period, saying that he liked the "excitement" and "meeting all the other artists with different points of view."

He also said in a later interview that "the contact and the dialogue with all those artists and the work that took place was just invaluable."

Among the young artists he hired was Edmond Casarella, who later developed an innovative technique using layered cardboard for woodcuts.

Velonis introduced silkscreen printing to the Poster Division of the WPA.

In 1996, the Metropolitan Museum of Art held an exhibition titled W.P.A. Color Prints: Images from the Federal Art Project. In the news release announcing the exhibition the museum said: "Although artists on the Federal Art Project produced color prints in all media, they were also instrumental in developing new printmaking techniques such as the carborundum etching and the screen print process. As printmaker Hyman Warsager recalled of his experience in the Graphic Arts Division of the W.P.A., 'The most startling contribution to color printmaking was added by the use of the silk screen'. Citing the pioneering efforts of artist Anthony Velonis, who initially spearheaded the use of the silk screen technique in the Poster Division of the W.P.A., for recognizing the possibilities of the medium, Warsager noted that the 'economy and ease of this process enabled the artist to employ sixteen to twenty colors to a print, whereas color lithography and wood block are limited to far fewer colors by both expense and labor'.