By Amy Zimmer
DNAinfo News Editor
MANHATTAN — Police have located a 90-year-old painter who went missing from NYU Medical Center Monday.
Joe Stefanelli, who was part of the city's abstract expressionist school of painting in the 1950s, which included the likes of Jackson Pollock, Willem De Kooning and Franz Kline, went missing from the hospital at First Avenue and East 30th Street. He was found late Monday afternoon and taken to Roosevelt Hospital, police said.
Sources said he had been taken to NYU Medical Center not as a patient, but with a family member and that he was not of "sound mind."
The painter lives in the Village's artists housing complex Westbeth at 463 West St. The former Bell Laboratories building was transformed by architect Richard Meier in 1970 as an affordable enclave for artists.
Stefanelli, standing roughly 5 feet 4 and weighing 140-pounds, was last seen wearing a dark hat, tan jacket, tan pants, and possibly wearing eyeglasses, police said.
In an undated interview with Stefanelli posted on YouTube, the painter talked about the downtown arts scene with Pollack, De Kooning and Kline in the 1950s, which centered around the Cedar Tavern in the West Village.
"That's where I liked to say I learned more about painting, the Cedar Street Bar and Grill, than any art school I went to," Stefanelli said.
Of abstract expressionism, Stefanelli said, "I think there was a feeling about paining that never existed in the America art world – a love of painting."
"Sure there was a social aspect but there was the artistic, the intense excitement [and] camaraderie that never existed," he said.
He also cited the "lack of commercialism at the time. Nobody was selling paintings. If anybody sold a painting it was an event."
Stefanelli, who studied at the Art Students League in the 1950s with Will Barnet, taught art at several institutions including the New School, Columbia and NYU. His work is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and others.
He has won several awards, including the 2005 Benjamin Altman award from the National Academy Museum and a 2000 award for his life's work from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation.
