Gregory d'Alessio

Gregory d'Alessio (1904-1993) worked as a cartoonist, painter, and teacher.  A native New Yorker, d'Alessio trained at the Art Students League and worked as a bank clerk, Wall Street runner, and cub reporter for the Brooklyn Eagle. After the stock market crash, he turned to cartooning and sold drawings to popular magazines including Esquire, the Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, and the New Yorker (which published his work between 1934 and 1940). For more than twenty years (1940-1963) d'Alessio drew the strip These Women for Publishers Syndicate, which included themes typical of popular culture's view of women in the 1940s and 1950s (women spending their husband's money, henpecked husbands, and women in the workplace, etc.) and depicted his characters in the latest fashions.  In 1960, d’Alessio returned to the Art Students League to teach drawing, which he did until 1990. D'Alessio was also an accomplished painter and guitarist.  His paintings were shown in Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of the City of New York, and elsewhere. In 1946, he helped found the Society of the Classic Guitar, and in the late 1940's he was also the secretary of the New York Classic Guitar Society.