"I enjoy painting sometimes. Some day I will make a good painting---a masterpiece of work, some day before I die." Andrea Badami, quoted by Gregg Blasdel in "Symbols and Images", courtesy Mr. and Mrs. Elias Getz, Twentieth-Century American Folk Art and Artists, Herbert W. Hemphill Jr. and Julia Weissman, 1974

Biography

Although his talent was evident in childhood drawings, circumstances prevented Andrea Badami from pursuing his artistic inclinations until later in life. When he was a child, Badami and his parents returned to their native Corleone, Sicily; as a young man, he was unwillingly conscripted into Mussolini's army despite his American citizenship and was taken prisoner by the British. Upon his release in 1947, ...