The New World

Albert Alcalay

In 2006 Albert Alcalay was interviewed by the Vineyard Gazette of Martha’s Vineyard, where he and his wife had settled after emigrating from Rome. He said of his work, colorful, abstract, and often non representational: “The painting does not tell the onlooker the whole story. The other part he must supply with his own imagination.” His love of color meant to him that even an entirely white scene, such as a wintery arctic landscape, would still require for him the color red, among others, in order to fully capture how he felt about the scene.

In “The New World,” Alcalay uses bold colors that are broken up into pieces like broken glass and carefully arranged on a moody gray background. Everything is encapsulated in the boundaries of a shaped plate, which conveys the roundness of a planet. Alcalay often juxtaposed his experience fleeing and then fighting Nazi Germany in relation to his life in the United States, finding new ways to place fractured shapes into a harmonious flow, as seen in the movement of “The New World”.