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Lot Essay
The Marino Marini Foundation will review this work at their forthcoming committee meeting in early December.
The present sculpture is from Marini's juggler and acrobat series, a small, joyous group of works the artist used as a springboard for an exploration of movement and form. Marini has clearly espoused this theme as one of celebration, of revelry and of fun, which provided an uplifting foil for the artist to his tragic rearing horse and rider. The elongated figure of the present Ballerino, reminiscent of the Rose Period pictures painted half a century earlier by the artist's friend Pablo Picasso, carries a waif-like elegance that accentuates the agility that is encompassed both in the theme and in Marini's own exploration of it.
Writing about Marini, Patrick Waldberg linked the theme of the juggler to the artist himself: "What with his willowy figure and a facial expression where innocence and a roguish knowingness are curiously blended, Marino himself has something of the look of a juggler in whom there might also be a little of the magician. The fierce attention a feat of jugglery demands, the strictness governing each gesture, the control needed in handling the objects kept continually in the air...a parallel comes to mind: must not the sculptor be equally attentive, must he not deploy his faculties with equal adroitness and precision in order, within such a complex whole, to isolate the chosen attitude? Slower in its cadence and sustained over a longer period of time, sculpture is also a series of connected operations in which hand and mind work in shifts and together. A superior kind of jugglery, when all is said and done" (quoted in H. Read, P. Waldberg and G. di San Lazzaro, op.cit., p. 139).
The present sculpture is from Marini's juggler and acrobat series, a small, joyous group of works the artist used as a springboard for an exploration of movement and form. Marini has clearly espoused this theme as one of celebration, of revelry and of fun, which provided an uplifting foil for the artist to his tragic rearing horse and rider. The elongated figure of the present Ballerino, reminiscent of the Rose Period pictures painted half a century earlier by the artist's friend Pablo Picasso, carries a waif-like elegance that accentuates the agility that is encompassed both in the theme and in Marini's own exploration of it.
Writing about Marini, Patrick Waldberg linked the theme of the juggler to the artist himself: "What with his willowy figure and a facial expression where innocence and a roguish knowingness are curiously blended, Marino himself has something of the look of a juggler in whom there might also be a little of the magician. The fierce attention a feat of jugglery demands, the strictness governing each gesture, the control needed in handling the objects kept continually in the air...a parallel comes to mind: must not the sculptor be equally attentive, must he not deploy his faculties with equal adroitness and precision in order, within such a complex whole, to isolate the chosen attitude? Slower in its cadence and sustained over a longer period of time, sculpture is also a series of connected operations in which hand and mind work in shifts and together. A superior kind of jugglery, when all is said and done" (quoted in H. Read, P. Waldberg and G. di San Lazzaro, op.cit., p. 139).