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Lot Essay
Looming and glistening, Arnaldo Pomodoro's La Colonna del viaggiatore, 1960, I is one of his most important sculptures. Dating from 1960, this work, which was created in an edition of one alongside two artist's proofs, has featured in many of the important monographs on Pomodoro's works, and casts of it have featured in many of his exhibitions. Standing three metres tall, this is an epic, gleaming, futuristic monolith covered with intricate forms which make up a landscape of detail, contrasting the macro with the micro. Its overwhelming monumentality is thus in stark contrast to the marks and ciphers which articulate so much of the surface, here looking like writings in lost alphabets, there like cracked machinery and in other places like mysterious assemblages of metallic volumes.
La Colonna del viaggiatore, 1960, I was created at a key turning point in Pomodoro's career, the year after he had made his first journey to the United States of America. While there, he has explained that he had a great epiphany on visiting a room featuring a number of sculptures by the Romanian artist Constantin Brancusi at the Museum of Modern Art. Their elegant, pared-back perfection appealed to Pomodoro, yet he wished to disrupt it. Accordingly, he began to push the shallow-relief 'writing' that had featured in some of his earlier works further into three dimensions. No longer was he using the incredibly fine process of cuttlebone casting: instead, he was turning increasingly to lost wax, creating arrays of objects that would then be moulded and cast. Pomodoro explained that, in reference to Brancusi's works, he 'experienced a deep wish to destroy their perfection. I imagined the in my mind's eye full of worm holes and corrosion, and then the idea came to me of setting all of my particular signs in the interior of these geometric solids, turning the abstract image of Brancusi inside out'. He continued by explaining the new role that scale came to play in works such as La Colonna del viaggiatore, 1960, I:
'Klee and Brancusi were my putative fathers, but I owe a great deal to the United States for awakening this new consciousness. In Europe, nobody understands why works of art in the US became so oversized; Europeans attribute that to an excess of exhibitionism or a misunderstood sense of monumentalism. In the USA I understood that the problem was to confront a limitless space completely different from our own. New York is an extraordinary city, the city of skyscrapers' (Pomodoro, quoted in S. Hunter, 'Monuments and Anti-monuments', pp. 57-77, F. Gualdoni (ed.), Arnaldo Pomodoro: Catalogo ragionato della sculptura, vol. I, Milan, 2007, p. 59).
That sense of visual scale and excitement is perfectly encapsulated in La Colonna del viaggiatore, 1960, I the sculpture is like a cityscape filled with details, or even like one of the tall buildings that had so impressed Pomodoro on his visit to New York. At the same time, Pomodoro happily admitted that his exposure to the current trends in painting also made a huge impression. 'I remember how for me the details of surface in Jackson Pollock's large canvases were so full of intrigue - his drips and marks had so much energy,' he explained. The meticulously-crafted, richly-worked and variegated surface of La Colonna del viaggiatore, 1960, I is analogous to Pollock's drips. In sculptures such as this, Pomodoro combined that sense of energetic movement and detail with the monumentality upon which he had also commented. Discussing the American art of the period, he said: 'You might say that I am trying to resolve a similar structural problem in my columns, to keep them human, so they can be read and enjoyed at close range by the spectator, who identifies with my surfaces, even though he also feels a monumental presence. Great public sculpture of the past had the same dual appeal of large and small, near and far' (Pomodoro, quoted in ibid., p. 63).
La Colonna del viaggiatore, 1960, I dates from a transitional phase in Pomodoro's work: it clearly espouses his new sense of scale, yet was created a handful of years before he had created his so-called 'erosions', the cavities in sheer mirror-finished metal that give such teasing glimpses of the workings beyond. Instead, La Colonna del viaggiatore, 1960, I has an openness: it is like an inscribed pillar, informed by the age of science. Indeed, the title hints at the backdrop of the pioneering spirit of the Space Race which was raging at the time. This is a monument to Mankind on the brink of new adventures; at the same time, with its mute writings in an unknowable language, La Colonna del viaggiatore, 1960, I hints at lost civilisations, at the increasing potential for destruction in a world with science at its disposal. Prefiguring in many ways the circuitry of computers and rockets, Pomodoro's sculpture is a lyrical stele to technology and to mankind.
La Colonna del viaggiatore, 1960, I was created at a key turning point in Pomodoro's career, the year after he had made his first journey to the United States of America. While there, he has explained that he had a great epiphany on visiting a room featuring a number of sculptures by the Romanian artist Constantin Brancusi at the Museum of Modern Art. Their elegant, pared-back perfection appealed to Pomodoro, yet he wished to disrupt it. Accordingly, he began to push the shallow-relief 'writing' that had featured in some of his earlier works further into three dimensions. No longer was he using the incredibly fine process of cuttlebone casting: instead, he was turning increasingly to lost wax, creating arrays of objects that would then be moulded and cast. Pomodoro explained that, in reference to Brancusi's works, he 'experienced a deep wish to destroy their perfection. I imagined the in my mind's eye full of worm holes and corrosion, and then the idea came to me of setting all of my particular signs in the interior of these geometric solids, turning the abstract image of Brancusi inside out'. He continued by explaining the new role that scale came to play in works such as La Colonna del viaggiatore, 1960, I:
'Klee and Brancusi were my putative fathers, but I owe a great deal to the United States for awakening this new consciousness. In Europe, nobody understands why works of art in the US became so oversized; Europeans attribute that to an excess of exhibitionism or a misunderstood sense of monumentalism. In the USA I understood that the problem was to confront a limitless space completely different from our own. New York is an extraordinary city, the city of skyscrapers' (Pomodoro, quoted in S. Hunter, 'Monuments and Anti-monuments', pp. 57-77, F. Gualdoni (ed.), Arnaldo Pomodoro: Catalogo ragionato della sculptura, vol. I, Milan, 2007, p. 59).
That sense of visual scale and excitement is perfectly encapsulated in La Colonna del viaggiatore, 1960, I the sculpture is like a cityscape filled with details, or even like one of the tall buildings that had so impressed Pomodoro on his visit to New York. At the same time, Pomodoro happily admitted that his exposure to the current trends in painting also made a huge impression. 'I remember how for me the details of surface in Jackson Pollock's large canvases were so full of intrigue - his drips and marks had so much energy,' he explained. The meticulously-crafted, richly-worked and variegated surface of La Colonna del viaggiatore, 1960, I is analogous to Pollock's drips. In sculptures such as this, Pomodoro combined that sense of energetic movement and detail with the monumentality upon which he had also commented. Discussing the American art of the period, he said: 'You might say that I am trying to resolve a similar structural problem in my columns, to keep them human, so they can be read and enjoyed at close range by the spectator, who identifies with my surfaces, even though he also feels a monumental presence. Great public sculpture of the past had the same dual appeal of large and small, near and far' (Pomodoro, quoted in ibid., p. 63).
La Colonna del viaggiatore, 1960, I dates from a transitional phase in Pomodoro's work: it clearly espouses his new sense of scale, yet was created a handful of years before he had created his so-called 'erosions', the cavities in sheer mirror-finished metal that give such teasing glimpses of the workings beyond. Instead, La Colonna del viaggiatore, 1960, I has an openness: it is like an inscribed pillar, informed by the age of science. Indeed, the title hints at the backdrop of the pioneering spirit of the Space Race which was raging at the time. This is a monument to Mankind on the brink of new adventures; at the same time, with its mute writings in an unknowable language, La Colonna del viaggiatore, 1960, I hints at lost civilisations, at the increasing potential for destruction in a world with science at its disposal. Prefiguring in many ways the circuitry of computers and rockets, Pomodoro's sculpture is a lyrical stele to technology and to mankind.