Vito Giallo (born
June 21, 1930) is perhaps an overlooked figure crucial to
Andy Warhol’s early career. Partner Ebby Weaver
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Vito Giallo (born
June 21, 1930) is perhaps an overlooked figure crucial to
Andy Warhol’s early career.
Vito Giallo was born on June 10, 1930 in Mount Vernon, New York, the son of Vito Giallo and Vera Verbasco. At 19, Giallo moved to New York to attend the Franklin School of Professional Arts, having won a scholarship through an illustration contest. On the first day, he met Ebby Weaver, an interior designer, who would become his life partner for the next 51 years. After graduation, he illustrated for “Mad Men”-style ad agencies such as Young & Rubicam and J. Walter Thompson.
In 1954, at the age of 23, Mr. Giallo opened the Loft Gallery at the studio of the graphic designer Jack Wolfgang Beck. AndyWarhol would do a total of three shows there—two collaborations and a solo—in 1954; they were some of his earliest showings. Secondly, Giallo would go on to become Warhol’s first paid assistant, having admired him as an increasingly popular commercial artist. They worked out of Warhol's railroad apartment on East 34th Street, which the artist shared with his mother. Giallo lived a block away, in a two-bedroom apartment he and Weaver rented from Bert Carpenter, an art professor at Columbia, for $85 a month.
In his year of employment under Warhol, he learned the latter’s blotted-line technique, a staple of his artwork at the time. After studying at New York’s Franklin School of Professional Arts, Vito Giallo found success as a graphic designer and commercial artist along with the same contemporaries he would showcase at his Loft Gallery, including Clint Hamilton and Nathan Gluck, who would later also serve as an assistant to Warhol.
Giallo stopped working for Warhol in 1957, after the two had a falling out. In 1961, Giallo opened his first antiques shop, on Third Avenue, a shop that had no shortage of famous celebrity patrons. Elton John, Andre Leon Talley, Greta Garbo, Robert Mapplethorpe, Franz Kilne, Mark Rothko (to name a few). “When they bought something, I delivered it to Rothko’s apartment, which was just around the corner,” Giallo said. Decades later, after Giallo moved his store to Madison Avenue, Warhol popped in and said, “‘Wow, you must be on Easy Street.’ He just loved the idea I was on Madison Avenue. And then he came every single day for the last eight years of his life.”
Giallo and Weaver would also take weekend trips to sales outside the city. At a roadside shop, he once reached into a bargain barrel and withdrew a Chinese drinking vessel made of pottery from the Han dynasty, which he later sold for $1,500. “When you get a few of those, you get very excited about antiques,” he said. “You want to find that one treasure.” His biggest coup came at a small estate sale in Connecticut, where he paid $12 for a watercolor painting of a pastoral dance scene, which turned out to be a Charles Demuth. (It sold for $180,000 at auction.)
Having sold his later antique prop rental establishment to none other than Martha Stewart, Vito Giallo now produces art himself, specializing in mixed-media collages and providing illustrations to a book on Superstar-associated hangouts of 60s and 70s New York. His relationship with Warhol seems to have been salvaged, as Warhol wrote in his diary about visiting Giallo’s shop as late as May of 1985.
Giallo currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. In 2022 he was featured in NYT, W, Elle, and debuted his highly anticipated jewelry collaboration with BK Jeweler, Catbird, which is still ongoing. Before the pandemic, Giallo would spend every morning at the cafe across the street. He’d order coffee and a pastry, sit down, and start talking to a stranger.
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