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 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.

Early life 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."

Around the year 1932, Velonis became interested in silk screen, together with fellow artist Fritz Brosius, and decided to investigate the practice. 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. Velonis began working for the federal WPA in 1935.

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.

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." 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. 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."

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'. 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."

Reflections of an Eminent Curator, 1941 In 1941 Carl Zigrosser, the "eminent" Curator of Prints, Drawings and Rare Books at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, wrote in his essay The Serigraph, A New Medium: “In 1935 the Federal Art Project opened a Poster Division in New York to supply posters for different branches of the Project and for other government agencies. It has been successful both as to quality and efficiency under the direction of Richard Floethe and has produced since its inception many hundred thousands of posters by the silk screen process. Attached to the staff of the Poster Division was a young artist, Anthony Velonis. He was thoroughly familiar with every aspect of silk screen technique, having previously worked in commercial shops; and he became more and more struck with its possibilities as a color print medium for artists. He was aware of the growing popularity of color woodcuts and color lithographs produced on the Project by means of expensive technical equipment beyond the means of the average artist, and he set out to perfect a more fluent and less expensive color printing process. Encouraged by the Project, he and other artists experimented with the new technique and adapted it to the artists’ needs.”

Zigrosser continued: "Late in 1938, in spite of some opposition and through the missionary work of the Public Use of Arts Committee and the United American Artists, a separate Silk Screen Unit, with Anthony Velonis at its head, was established as a branch of the Graphic Section of the New York City W.P.A. Art Project. There Velonis taught and gave technical advice to many artists."

While Velonis and the other artists on the project did not "invent" a new technique, they creatively and collectively adapted an existing one. Zigrosser wrote: "It is the virtue of Velonis and his associates on the Project that they achieved the momentum of a collective enterprise. Instead of working laboriously and independently at discovering one and the same thing, they pooled their discoveries and went beyond them. It is the particular virtue of Velonis that with a technical equipment surpassing the others, he was able to lay down a method that worked most simply and efficiently for artists. It is his organizing and adapting ability that has made the serigraph possible for artists, and it is the collective momentum of himself and his associates that has spread the knowledge to all parts of the country."

Creative Printmakers Group, the National Serigraph Society, and the Ceraglass Company In 1939, Velonis founded the Creative Printmakers Group, along with three others, including Hyman Warsager.

The next year, Velonis, Max Arthur Cohn, Warsager, and other artists co-founded the National Serigraph Society. It started out with relatively small commercial projects, such as "rather fancy" Christmas cards that were sold to many of the upscale Fifth Avenue shops for a dollar apiece.

In 1940 Velonis and Warsager also founded the Ceraglass Company, a silkscreening firm intended to experiment with silkscreen prints on glass and plastic.

Exhibitions Velonis' art has appeared in a number of exhibitions in the northeastern United States, including the following: Museum of Modern Art, 1936 Weyhe Gallery, New York, 1940 Brooklyn Museum, 1940 Springfield Museum of Fine Arts, Massachusetts, 1940 Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1996 Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2016 Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2025

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