Onorio Ruotolo

Who was Onorio Ruotolo?

A sculptor and poet, Onorio Ruotolo was born in Cervinara, Italy.

He studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Naples and emigrated to the United States in 1908. The struggle and poverty he observed in New York City engendered in him a concern for society, which he expressed in cartoons, poetry, and sculpture. During World War I, he produced a number of sculptures showing the horrors of war. In 1914, he and Arturo Giovannitti became co-directors of Il Fuoco, a magazine of art and politics. After an ideological split, Ruotolo began Minosse, a socio-literary publication. In 1923 Ruotolo founded the Leonardo da Vinci Art School on Manhattan's Lower East Side. The school was created to provide arts education for New York's immigrant community, and it remained in operation for almost twenty years. In 1924 Isamu Noguchi took his first sculpture class at the Leonardo da Vinci Art School, and Noguchi began his artistic career with the academic sculpture that he created as Ruotolo's protégé. Ruotolo was most well known for his portrait sculpture, including busts of Caruso, Arturo Toscannini, Thomas Edison, Theodore Dreiser and Helen Keller. In addition to his career as sculptor and teacher, Ruotolo also was a critic, editor, poet, illustrator and cartoonist. In the 1940s and 1960s, he turned his efforts to poetry and prose, and from 1950-1957 served as an aide of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. His biography was written by photojournalist, his countryman, Angelo Marchese in 2003. The book, published by Il Caudino, titled "Onorio Ruotolo, un figlio dimenticato."