By Carol Gordon Wood

Born in Queens, New York in 1933 to an Italian American father and a German immigrant mother, Constance DelVecchio showed an early interest and ability in the arts. Her parents, who shared a European artistic heritage, supported her development in both art and music.

She won her first art award in junior high school. Her art teacher encouraged her to attend the School of Industrial Arts (now the School of Art and Design) to prepare for a career in art. This relatively new school, established in 1936, was among the first in the country to offer an arts curriculum at the high school level.

After graduation, at the age of sixteen, Constance traveled with her mother to Germany to broaden her artistic horizons and to meet members of her mother’s family, including some cousins who were artists. Her cousin Jacob Borsch, a musician and artist known for his portraits of film actresses painted during the war, conveys in this fashionable portrait of Constance an appealing combination of innocence and self-assurance. She was struck by the devastation of Europe following World War II.

Upon her return, she won a scholarship to the Parsons School of Design. Founded in 1896 by
American Impressionist painter William Merritt Chase as the Chase School, it soon became the New York School of Art. Frank Alvah Parsons, director from 1911 to 1930, broadened the curriculum to include the first interior design, graphic design, and advertising programs in the United States, and renamed the school the New York School of Fine and Applied Art. In 1941 it was renamed in his honor the Parsons School of Design. Its alumni include Edward Hopper, Jane Frank, and Norman Rockwell. It was the ideal place to develop the skills and techniques necessary to pursue a career in commercial art.

Constance DelVecchio Maltese also studied at the Art Students League, where she still attends life sessions to draw and paint from the model. The League was founded in 1875 by a group of young European-trained American artists to be open to all, unlike the older, more staid and exclusive National Academy of Design. With no set curriculum, degrees, or diplomas, it was the only art school in the country to hold life classes every weekday. It offered classes in drawing and painting from antique casts and from life, portraiture, composition, modeling, and perspective. Its chief instructor in its early years was William Merritt Chase, and many leading artists of the day joined its faculty. In the 1920s and 30s several members of the influential realist group the Eight, or Ashcan School, taught there?Robert Henri, John Sloan, William Glackens, Everett Shinn, George Bellows, and George Luks. At the same time, modernist, abstract painters Max Weber, Vaclav Vytiacil, Jan Matulka, Stuart Davis and Hans Hofmann were also on the faculty. The printmaking curriculum expanded under graphic artists Joseph Pennell, Martin Lewis and George Picken. As president John Sloan said in 1931, the League “furnishes... a varied menu of nourishment for the hungry art student, ranging from the conservative to the ultra-modern.”1

Constance’s training at Parsons School of Design and The Art Students League gave her a solid background in the classical or academic tradition of anatomy and life drawing, and a broad command of media and techniques, while keeping her au courant with contemporary art.

In the early 1950s she launched her career as a commercial artist, working first for Norcross Greeting Cards, then as Art Director for Pfizer Pharmaceuticals. At this time she met her future husband, Serphin Maltese, a Korean War veteran. When they were married in 1955, Constance continued her own business, freelancing in commercial art as Maltese Design Studio, and supporting the family while her husband attended college and law school. She also did some fashion and advertising modeling, showing the beauty and charm that she still possesses. Her work was in demand, and she developed an impressive roster of clients including Random House, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Regents, Dodd Mead, My Baby magazine, Johnson and Johnson, the New York Stock Exchange, J. Walter Thompson, Kodak, the United States Marines, Thomas Electronics, the National Society to Prevent Blindness, and the New York Diabetes Association. She pioneered the inclusion of ethnic minorities in textbook and advertising illustration. Her work in illustration honed her observational and representational skills for figure and portrait painting. It also showed imagination and a sense of humor, as in her poster Courage, which graphically depicts the notion of Columbus sailing off the edge of a flat world?a widely-held belief before his reaching the other shores.

Throughout her career, DelVecchio/Maltese has been politically active and deeply engaged in family and community. In 1962 she assisted in the co-founding of the Conservative Party in New York State, with her husband Serphin Maltese, Dan Mahoney and Kieran O’Doherty. Serphin has served as State Senator since 1988, representing the 15th Senatorial District in Queens County in the City of New York. Together they have made many outstanding contributions to education and the arts, including the recent restoration of the monumental history painting Return of Columbus to the Spanish Court by the turn-of-the-century Spanish artist Raimondo De Madrazo in the Italian Charities of America headquarters in Elmhurst, Queens.

While raising her two daughters and working as a commercial artist, DelVecchio/Maltese produced many family portraits, which were not publicly exhibited. She also continued to learn from other artists, including an art mentor, Thornton Utz, a portraitist and illustrator for The Saturday Evening Post. In 1987 she was commissioned to create a portrait of Christopher Columbus. The commission came through her friend, Dr. Anne Paolucci, who had founded Columbus Countdown ’92 to plan the 500th Anniversary Celebration of Columbus’s landing in the New World. Over the next four years this project evolved into the monumental Age of Discovery Navigators Series. The thirteen mixed media portraits in this series drew on all the artist’s imaginative, design, and technical skills. They are in effect history paintings using individuals as a point of departure for an encapsulation of major historical events. Widely exhibited and reproduced, they were the subject of a major two-year exhibition at the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum (aboard the historic aircraft carrier Intrepid, anchored off Manhattan’s West Side), with intensive educational programs. The artist published and documented the series in her book, An Artist’s Journey of Discovery (2000). This project enabled her to shift her focus from commercial art to fine art.

Through portraiture, DelVecchio/Maltese has come into her own as a fine artist. Her recent American Women Series is another example of heroic figure painting that commemorates history through individuals. Her selection of women’s roles to portray in this series includes family as well as public ones. She chose the subjects for their outstanding achievement in their fields, and to represent women from “all walks of life” and “different ethnic backgrounds.” She says: “Women are not only outstanding for being great homemakers and mothers, but excel as well in professions that were at one time reserved only for men. As an artist I was concerned that the canvas should exhibit the woman chosen in her best light, and to execute the composition and technique of the painting in a painterly fashion.”2

DelVecchio/Maltese generally works from life, making a preliminary charcoal sketch. She may use photographs for reference as she develops the finished work. Her sketches are very free and show her ability to capture a likeness quickly and with economy of line. While her primary medium is oil, she also likes to work in pastel, which supports the spontaneity that is essential to her working method.