BENJAMIN PROUST FINE ART LIMITED London ALBERTO BURRI Città di Castello, Italy 1915 – Nice, France 1995 COMBUSTIONE PLASTICA 1956 Plastic and acrylic on canvas 85,7 x 99,8 cm Provenance: Galleria Blu, Milan. Private Collection, Italy (acquired from the above in the early 1960s). Literature: E. Vietta, "Alberto Burri", in Art International, Zurich 1959 (illustrated, p. 32). E. Crispolti, Burri, un saggio e tre note, Milan 1961 (illustrated, p. 35). C. Brandi, Burri, Rome 1963, no. 72 (illustrated, unpaged). M. Calvesi, Alberto Burri, Milan 1971 (illustrated, p. 125). Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini (ed.), Burri. Contributi al catalogo sistematico, Cittá di Castello 1990, no. 461 (illustrated in colour, p. 115). C. Christov – Bakargiev (ed.), Burri 1915 – 1995: Retrospektive, exh.cat., Rome, 1996. 43-44 New Bond Street London - W1S 2SA +44 7500 804 504 VAT: 126655310 dd [email protected] Company n° 7839537 www.benjaminproust.com Exhibited: Basel, Galerie d'Art Moderne Marie-Suzanne Feigel, Alberto Burri, 1959, no. 1. Milan, Galleria Blu, Mostra Plastiche di Burri, 1964, no. 3 (illustrated, p. 17). Arezzo, Galleria Comunale d'Arte Contemporanea, Burri--Cagli-Fontana-Guttuso-Moreni- Morlotti, Sei pittori italiani dagli anni quaranta ad oggi, 1967 (illustrated, p. XXII). This exhibition later travelled to Rome, Istituto Italo-Latino Americano. Luino, Palazzo Verbania, Civico Centro di Cultura, BURRI & PALAZZOLI: La Santa Alleanza, 2001 (illustrated in colour, p. 87). This exhibition later travelled to Milan, Galleria Blu. The art of the immediate post-1945 period was one of transformation, of reassessment, created under the threat of ultimate destruction. As the world tried to restore equilibrium after global conflict was halted by nuclear explosions, artists realised that the old languages, the old ways would no longer serve their needs. As swathes of Europe stood in ruins and reconstruction slowly began, artists began to rebuild too, drawing on their own experiences to find a voice that could express this new order. Alberto Burri's work challenges us on every level with its choice and use of materials, its rejection of the natural world, its uncompromising imagery that confronts our conception of art history and the lineage of painting. Almost sixty years after its creation, Combustione Plastica, 1956 still has the power to burst our notions of pictorial beauty and redraw the rules. By 1956, Burri was one of the leading exponents of a strand of European culture that was redefining our notion of visual art, using deliberately selected non-art materials that threatened the hegemony of paint, canvas and brush to create images of great but harsh beauty (Fig 1 & 2). Like his pioneering countryman Lucio Fontana, Burri dispensed with the need to create a facsimile of some aspect of the real world, seeking instead to make his images speak to us through their vigour. Trained as a doctor before WWII, Burri saw service in North Africa and had then been a prisoner of war, first under the British and then the Americans, being held in Texas during the later years of the war. Returning to Italy in 1946, he abandoned his medical career to become an artist. He very quickly moved away from representation and by 1949 the series of works that would make his name was well under way. The Sacchi works, referring to the sackcloth which generally formed their largest constituent, consisted of ruined, torn burlap, stitched and glued together and then with delicate touches of colour added. Burri himself offered little elaboration on their imagery, but it is possible to see this rough material, so prevalent as an all-purpose packing material during the war and the physical container of the aid being issued under the Marshall Plan to a hungry and damaged Italy, as symbolic of the wounds of wartime. Some commentators have taken the sackcloth analogy further, pointing out that Burri hailed from near the town of Assisi, famed for its connection to St.Francis, and have been able to draw parallels with the brown robes of the Franciscan order, depicted in baroque painting, and thus encompass the idea that the torn and stitched surface echoes the wounds of the stigmata, perhaps even suggesting a connection with the damaged and traumatised state of Italy itself. Such connections of materials and experience has a parallel in the work of Burri's German contemporary Joseph Beuys, whose concentration on particular everyday substances transformed by association relates directly to his own extreme wartime exposure. Burri's use of materials was always experimental, and in the early 1950s he began to make controlled burnings of wood, paper and later, plastics, to make new forms and textures (Fig 3). These works, the Combustione, played upon the classical idea of the creation of beauty from fire, and in Combustione Plastica, 1956 the addition of the burnt sheet of acrylic, and thus by implication the presence of heat and flame, to the matt black background lifts these humble materials to an object that captivates the viewer. The white plastic, coloured by the reactions and soot of its own near-destruction, solidifies into forms that themselves are reminiscent of flames, darting across the picture surface, and casting shadows which constantly change. Dating to 1956, this particular Combustione is an important example from amongst the earliest of Burri's incorporations of plastic into his paintings, and is the product of a period in his career when worldwide recognition was beginning to build momentum. He had been included in the 1952 Venice Biennale, and the following year had held his first one-man exhibition in the United States. In 1955 he married, and was also included in the important MoMA New York exhibition The New Decade: 22 European Painters and Sculptors, heralding his first visit to America since the war. The first monograph on his work, by James Johnson Sweeney, was also published in 1955, and in 1956 he participated in both the Venice Biennale and the Rome Quadrienalle. This new treatment of materials by Burri, so harsh yet so necessary for their rebirth, was a precursor of much that was to become the common currency of the avant-grade in the 1960s; the use of 'poor' and non-art materials, the incorporation of destructive processes to create anew, the turning away from the traditional path of painting, something that would come to fruition with the whole Arte Povera movement. His work can also be seen as an influence on specific artists, his controlled use of fire and heat having an obvious parallel in the work of Yves Klein, and perhaps most contentiously, the question of influence/confluence is raised in relation to Robert Rauchenberg. Cy Twombly and Rauchenberg had visited Burri's Rome studio in February 1953, a period when he was at the heart of the Sacchi paintings. Both Burri and Rauchenberg had already independently produced works that took a broadly similar approach to materials. Whilst subsequent debate amongst scholars has inevitably concentrated on the question of who did what first, it is clear that both artists were at the forefront of explorations into new ways of finding and using materials to create artworks that broke with the past and set the tone for the future. Were I master of an exact and less threadbare terminology, were I a marvellously alert and enlightened critic, I still could not verbally establish a close connection with my painting; my words would be marginal notes upon the truth within the canvas....I can only say this; painting for me is a freedom attained, constantly consolidated, vigilantly guarded so as to draw from it the power to paint more. (The Artist, quoted in The New Decade: 22 European Painters and Sculptors, New York 1955 rir>;q= .,/-;4- : '-----= -\"/, --_a-----' ___- Fig 1. Alberto Burri, Rosso, 1956. Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini Collezione Burri, Città di Castello, Italy. \ Fig 2. Alberto Burri, Tutto Nero, 1956. Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini Collezione Burri, Città di Castello, Italy. Fig 3. Alberto Burri welding in his Studio circa 1955. Photographer: Marvin P. Lazarus. Rudi Blesh papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. .