For Victor Caglioti, painting “encompassed the human experience.” An artist, professor, and “proudly self-proclaimed peasant,” his work had been in solo and group shows at Ashawagh Hall in Springs, Guild Hall in East Hampton, the Elaine Benson Gallery in Bridgehampton, and the Benton Gallery in Southampton. A regular in what became the Artists and Writers Softball Game, first as a player at first and third bases, and later as a coach, he was a part of the game “from its casual beginnings to today’s star-studded lineups,” according to his family.
Mr. Caglioti died of Covid-19 in Greenport on Aug. 26. He was 90.
A resident of Hampton Bays, he had been a part of the East End art world since the late 1950s. In addition to galleries here, he had shown his work widely in Manhattan and in Minneapolis and St. Paul. His paintings are in public, corporate, and private collections, including those of New York University, Guild Hall, the Banco di Roma, the 3M Corporation, St. Lawrence University, and the Dayton Hudson Corporation.
He spent summers teaching at Southampton College as a visiting artist and had visiting appointments at Sacred Heart University, Manhattanville College, and Rutgers University. Recognized by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he had received commissions from the former United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and Colwell Press of Minneapolis.
Mr. Caglioti was born in Inwood on Long Island on July 20, 1935, to Giuseppe Caglioti and the former Angelarosa Nardi. As a boy, he worked as a produce loader in the Brooklyn Terminal Market, and later in his youth was a barge seaman, carnival roustabout, gravedigger, cab driver, and gardener.
His interest in painting led him to Albright Art School in Buffalo in the 1950s, “where he arrived to find his portfolio abandoned in the hall and the school closed,” his family wrote. “Left scrambling in an unfamiliar city, he found himself enrolled in Buffalo State and living in a boarding house. It was there he met the love of his life, Roberta Bieber, and some key artists for his future career including the painter Howard Conant.” Conant would prove instrumental in furthering Mr. Caglioti’s art education at New York University and Columbia University.
Mr. Caglioti and Ms. Bieber were married on Nov. 7, 1958. She “was key in guiding him from being a full-time gardener . . . to a tenured faculty member in the studio art department at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities,” where he was a professor from 1970 until 1996. They raised their three children first in Lawrence in Nassau County and later in Minneapolis.
When she was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease while still in her 40s, he was a devoted caregiver and advocate.
Mr. Caglioti was known for his warmth as a teacher and mentor, and many of his students came to refer to him as “Pop.” His family said that his “surpassing talent and lifelong aspiration” was “to transform objects and to transform lives.”
In recent years, he had been focusing his attention on an opera he was writing under the pen name Frank Farniolas. In it, he wrote, “I do not paint for an audience or for myself. I paint for the chance to experience myself. I paint for the curiosity of painting.”
He is survived by two daughters, Angelarosa Caglioti-Lawson of Seattle and Carla Caglioti of Hampton Bays, and by a son-in-law, John Hall, a daughter-in-law, Daphne Trakis, three grandchildren, Gemma Caglioti, Paolo Caglioti, and Loomis Hall, and many nieces and nephews.
His wife died before him, as did four siblings, Dominic, Thomas, Anthony, and Rugierre, a son, Antonio, and a son-in-law, Frederic Lawson.
