SYLVIA JACOBS LAURENTI (American, 1918 - 2006). ABSTRACT IN BLUE, signed and dated 1963 lower right. Oil on canvas - Framed, 32 in. x 25 1/2 in. Estimate $150-250
Sylvia Jacobs Laurenti was an American painter and art collector. She was born February 16, 1918 in Chicago, Illinois to David Jacobs, a leather craftsman trained in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Bertha Jacobs (née Altman, from Hungary). She has two sisters, who were pianists.
Laurenti worked in advertising for many years in New York and San Francisco. She married Dr. Luigi Laurenti, an economist with the World Bank on March 31, 1959 in Clark County, Nevada. They lived in Cali, Columbia for many years, then in Washington D.C. After they divorced Sylvia continued to live in the nation's capital until she died on March 15, 2006 at the age of 88.
She studied painting privately and produced her work mainly in the 1950s and 1960s. She was an astute collector of art as well as a painter, and maintained close connections to artists in New York and Tucson, AZ. Berta Wright, a major figure in the Arizona art scene, was a close friend.
