Nicholas Brigante

Nick Brigante immigrated to the United States with his family as a young child, settling in Los Angeles. He worked as a billboard painter and attended the Art Students League in Los Angeles, studying with Rex Slinkard, Val Costello, Lawrence Murphy, and Stanton Macdonald-Wright. There he was introduced to the traditions of ancient art, from Asia to the Middle East. After serving in the army in World War I, Brigante returned to California and joined the Group of Independent Artists, who organized the first modern art exhibition ins Los Angeles in 1923. In the late 1920s he began synthesizing his interests in Asian art, abstraction, and realistic figuration into brightly colored and refined landscape and genre scenes.