Vincent Longo

Vincent Longo, whose distinguished career as a painter and printmaker spanned more than six decades and whose influence as a teacher was felt by three generations of artists, died at home in Amagansett on Sept. 4 with his wife, Kate Davis, at his side. He was 94 and had had cancer for 18 months.

Although he came of age as a member of the New York School, from the beginning and throughout his career his work remained resolutely his own. It was rooted in geometry, a deep understanding of the effects of color, and boundless curiosity about the art and philosophy of other cultures as well as his own.

The Buddhist mandala and Hindu yantra were recurring motifs in his work, less for their symbolism, he said, than for their simple renewal of archetypal forms, which he believed had a bearing on contemporary discourse.

In 1957, Mr. Longo was hired to teach at Bennington College, where he remained for 10 years. Among his colleagues were the color field painters Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, and Paul Feeley, as well as the influential critic Clement Greenberg. He taught from 1967 to 2001 at Hunter College, where he was named the first Phyllis and Joseph Caroff Chair of Fine Arts.

He was born in Manhattan on Feb. 15, 1923, to Salvatore Longo and the former Margaritta Stigliano. Orphaned at the age of 2, he and his brother, Frank, were sent to St. Agatha’s Home for Children in Nanuet, N.Y., where they lived for 12 years. The property was fenced in, and trips to the world outside were rare, he once said.

He and his brother eventually went to live with an aunt in Brooklyn, and Mr. Longo studied commercial art at Textile High School in Manhattan before attending Cooper Union and the Brooklyn Museum Art School, where he studied with Max Beckmann and Ben Shahn. He had his first solo exhibition at the museum in 1953.

Since then, his work has been exhibited continuously. It is in dozens of public collections, among them the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. A retrospective of his prints was held at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Detroit Institute of Art. He was also a member of the National Academy