Sculptor and graphic artist. Born in Catania, Sicily, into a poor family, he entered a monumental mason’s workshop at the age of 13, and studied at the Palermo Academy of Art. In 1933 he travelled to Rome for the first time. Already inspired by classical and Etruscan art, he now also came under the influence of the contemporary sculptors, Arturo Martini, Marino Marini and Giacomo Manzù. In 1935 he set up a studio outside Catania. He gave the first indication of his distinctive style of broad modelling in a terracotta bust entitled Omino (1939, Gallery of Modern Art, Rome) and in 1942 moved permanently to Rome, setting up a studio there, after the war, in 1947. In a one-man show at the Galleria del Secolo in 1948, Greco exhibited two of the mannered full-length figures which were to become his most admired productions. In 1953 he won a competition for a monument to the fictional character Pinocchio, for the town of Collodi in Tuscany. This used negative spaces in a manner reminiscent of the Russian sculptor Ossip Zadkine. In Greco’s figures of female bathers from the 1950s traditional gestures of modesty are used to create an intimate sensual effect. Increasingly respected by the establishment, he began in the 1960s to receive important church commissions. These included bronze doors for Orvieto Cathedral (1961–62, installed 1970) and the monument to Pope John XXIII for St Peter’s in Rome (1965–67). The latter consists of a large bronze relief showing the Pope visiting prisoners, children and the sick, whilst angels descend with messages of hope. A bronze cast of his Crouching Figure No. 4 (1973) was used as the centrepiece of a fountain commissioned by Westminster City Council and unveiled at the junction of Carlos Place and Mount Street, London, 1987. Greco was also a skilled draughtsman and etcher.
Bibliography: Archivi Emilio Greco (website); Dictionary of Art (ed. J.S. Turner), London and New York (34 vols; distrib. by Macmillan), 1996; J.P. Hodin, Emilio Greco. Sculpture and Drawings, Bath, 1971; L. Sciascia, Emilio Greco, Rome, 1971; P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster. Volume 1, Liverpool, 2011, pp. xlii, 18–19, 449–50.
Philip Ward-Jackson, 2011