Practical Anatomy

In Manhattan's St. Nicholas Arena one night last week the smoke curdled in a cone of hot light above the ring, the crowd yelled, the gong clanged and the boys in the fourth bout bobbed out of their corners. Probably nobody there was reminded of George Bellows' prizefight pictures except one of the boys, Tony Sisti from Buffalo. Tony, who had been out of the ring nearly nine years, was staging a comeback. Its purpose, which tickled the sportswriters: to finance his own art exhibition this week at Manhattan's Argent Galleries.

Born in the Greenwich Village Italian colony 37 years ago, Anthony Sisti began to draw early, though he says his cafe-keeping father never drew anything but beer from a tap. He began to box in 1917 at a Buffalo, N.Y. gym, and the next year won the amateur bantamweight championship of New York State. From then until 1930 he fought 100 professional bouts, lost 15, earned enough to go to Europe for five years and enough while there to pay tuition at the Florence Academy, where he got his doctor's degree in painting.

Rocky, radiant, soft-spoken Anthony Sisti, who runs his own art school in Buffalo and flies to Manhattan every week to teach drawing at the New York School of Applied Design for Women, belongs to the modern school in art and the old school in boxing. A praiser of the days when fighters like Benny Leonard relied on brains rather than bang, Tony Sisti planned to eke out six cagey rounds last week. Instead, he found his young and hopeful opponent open to certain applications of practical anatomy, dropped him once and knocked him out for good in 70 seconds of the first round.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.