The painter Armando De Stefano, master of Neapolitan realist painting, has died

Armando De Stefano was 94 years old, protagonist of all the artistic events in Naples in the post-war period

Born in Naples on November 27, 1926, he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts with the master Emilio Notte, to then begin his teaching career at the Art High School and then at the Academy itself (1950-1992), where he painted the ceiling of the rector's study.

The artistic beginnings

De Stefano began his artistic activity in 1947, giving life to the “Gruppo Sud” with six other Neapolitan painters, an expression of his adherence to a realistic-social painting. The years from 1956 to 61 saw him engaged in an area that recalled material and abstract Expressionism. In 62 De Stefano rediscovered the pleasure of returning to image painting, with all the popular and narrative aspects it is capable of expressing. From then on, his great cycles were born, which from the Inquisition to Masaniello to the Neapolitan Revolution of 1799, have occupied De Stefano for a long time.

De Stefano participated in the Venice Biennale from 1950 to 1956 and in 1961 he was present in the Italian Pavilion of the same Biennale and at the International Exhibition of Madrid. He was present at the Quadriennale d'Arte in Rome in 1951, 1955, 1960 and 1986.

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Some of his works are housed in the church of the Santissima Annunziata and in the church of San Giovanni Evangelista (Bonea hamlet) in Vico Equense, at the Capodimonte Museum in Naples, at the Museum of Chieti, at the Museum in Palazzo d'Avalos in Vasto, in Giulianova, in Milan, in Florence; some works are in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, many in New York in the Ernst Kahn collection, at the Marshall Field Foundation in Chicago and in the collection of the Museum of Durazzo in Albania. Among his most important Neapolitan exhibitions are those at the Pan (Palace of Arts) and at the Mother.