Biography
Marco Sassone was born in 1942 in Campi Bisenzio, a small town in Tuscany, near Florence. Receiving instruction in art during his childhood, the artist enrolled in 1959 at the Instituto Galileo Galilei, where he studied architectural drafting. In 1963 he began working with the painter Silvio Loffredo, who had been a pupil of the Austrian master Kokoschka. Loffredo encouraged Sassone to find his own style; at the age of 25 Sassone showed his work at Lo Sprone Cultural Center in Florence.
In November 1967, after Florence’s great flood, Sassone moved to America, settling in California and eventually moving to Laguna Beach, a small seaside community with a commitment to the arts. He began showing at the town’s annual Festival of the Arts, and exhibited regularly in the 1970s, both in the United States and abroad. In 1978, he received a gold medal from the Italian Academy of the Arts. A year later a retrospective exhibition of his work opened at the Laguna Art Museum, and an accompanying monograph, Sassone by Donelson Hoopes, was published.
A high mark in Sassone’s career occurred in 1982, when Italian President Sandro Bertini knighted him into the Order of the Merit of the Italian Republic. A year before Sassone had moved his studio to San Francisco. Always sensitive to the plight of the poor, Sassone studied the city’s homeless, living with them on the streets during the day before returning to his studio to sleep. In 1984 he donated paintings for an auction held by the Inter Aid Organization, which works with children in crisis. After participating in many group and solo shows throughout the 1980s, Sassone exhibited “Home on the Streets,” a show devoted to portraits of homeless people, in 1994 at the Museo ItaloAmericano in San Francisco.
Three years later, in 1997, Sassone opened two solo shows in Florence: “Marco Sassone 1987-1997” at Galleria d’Arte Mentana and “Home on the Streets” in the cloisters of Santa Croce. In 2001, he took part in the show “Master and Pupil: Oscar Kokoschka, Silvio Loffredo, Marco Sassone,” presented by the Museo ItaloAmericano. A year later the Palazzo Ducale Museum in Massa-Carrara gave Sassone a retrospective exhibition, reviewed by La Nazione and La Repubblica. In 2005, the artist relocated his studio to Toronto, where he continues to work on his expressionist landscape and cityscapes. |
