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Lot Essay
Composizione is a bronze sculpture by Marino Marini based on a plaster original showing the Italian artist's most celebrated theme: a man on a horse. In this sculpture, conceived in 1955-56, Marini has depicted the rider unbalanced, just on the brink of falling from his steed's back. This is an image of collapse, of the end of the old bond between man and horse, and indeed between Man and Nature, which Marini saw as a sign of the times in the industrial world, especially in the wake of the Second World War. Composizione indicates Marini's own anxieties at this apocalyptic rupture, and channels them all the more through the sculpture's almost geometric forms. These recall architecture and engineering as much as the art of the ancient world which had formerly been so important to Marini.
This use of a visual language that borrowed from technology and buildings reveals the importance of Marini's first trip to New York in 1950, where he was attending the opening of an exhibition of his work at Curt Valentin's gallery. Marini's exposure to this modern city in the New World had a huge impact, as can be discerned in Composizione. The planar rigidity of some of the forms recall the modern forms of the cars and skyscrapers that he would have seen there, while he was also exposed to New York's bustling art scene. He was in part introduced to this through the members of the European and American avant gardes whom he encountered, ranging from Hans Arp and Alexander Calder to Max Beckmann and Lyonel Feininger. The relevance of the latter two may be seen in the vitality that Marini has captured in the linearity of the forms that comprise Composizione, perhaps recalling German Expressionism. At the same time, they also hint at the influence of the energy of Abstract Expressionism, of which Marini was more and more aware during this period. It is the electric jolt of these sharp edges and corners that lends Composizione its visual force, heightening its sense of dynamism. As Marini himself explained, 'What gives a work of art its modeling and its structure if it is not the release of the vital impulse?' (Marino Marini, 'Thoughts of Marino Marini', pp.5-11, G. di San Lazzaro, ed., Homage to Marino Marini, New York, n.d., p.5).
This use of a visual language that borrowed from technology and buildings reveals the importance of Marini's first trip to New York in 1950, where he was attending the opening of an exhibition of his work at Curt Valentin's gallery. Marini's exposure to this modern city in the New World had a huge impact, as can be discerned in Composizione. The planar rigidity of some of the forms recall the modern forms of the cars and skyscrapers that he would have seen there, while he was also exposed to New York's bustling art scene. He was in part introduced to this through the members of the European and American avant gardes whom he encountered, ranging from Hans Arp and Alexander Calder to Max Beckmann and Lyonel Feininger. The relevance of the latter two may be seen in the vitality that Marini has captured in the linearity of the forms that comprise Composizione, perhaps recalling German Expressionism. At the same time, they also hint at the influence of the energy of Abstract Expressionism, of which Marini was more and more aware during this period. It is the electric jolt of these sharp edges and corners that lends Composizione its visual force, heightening its sense of dynamism. As Marini himself explained, 'What gives a work of art its modeling and its structure if it is not the release of the vital impulse?' (Marino Marini, 'Thoughts of Marino Marini', pp.5-11, G. di San Lazzaro, ed., Homage to Marino Marini, New York, n.d., p.5).