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Lot Essay
This work is accompanied by a certificate issued by the Archives Antonio Saura and will be included in the forthcoming Antonio Saura Catalogue Raisonné, being prepared by the Archives Antonio Saura and Olivier Weber-Caflisch.
Completed three years before founding the Spanish group El Paso, Antonio Saura's Polyptique Métamorphose presages many of the groups driving forces--principle among them being the promotion of advanced forms of painting developed in Europe and the United States. One of the first in Spain to champion Jackson Pollock, Saura formed an unprecedented dialogue between his native country and the New York art world through his numerous trips to the U.S. where he established influential relationships with Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline. "The initial blob creates a plane," Saura once explained, approaching his canvas with the same artistic fervor as his American counterparts. "A background appears. The first blob calls forth a second, the second a third. It is a fatal chain: freedom is at an end! One is no longer responsible, one becomes a kind of monster. As with love, at times. There is no doubt: to paint is sometimes to perform an act of love. But it is also an act of protest" (A. Saura, Recent Paintings, exh. cat., Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York, 1964, n.p.).
Suspended on twenty uniformly white canvases, Saura's dynamic, autonomous painting becomes a pivotal member of one of the most important series of the artist's mature oeuvre, where further members of this eponymous series are located in such prominent museums as the Reina Sofía in Madrid. "The first assemblage of these pictures--a polyptych made up of numerous shapeless faces," Saura explained, "looked like an antique chest, or a reliquary, or the niches in a cemetery wall, in which each compartment, separated from the others, contained a face fixed in its dynamic ecstasy, suddenly cut short and fossilized on the surface" (A. Saura, quoted in O. Weber-Caflisch, ed., "Heads , Metamorphosis" in Antonio Saura par lui-même, Geneva, 2009, p. 198). Expressive and dynamic the Polyptique Métamorphose series has most eloquently been described by Saura himself: "That snap of the head isolated in the void of a vast space soon turns into a cry. The head raised above an opaque barrier, suggesting a particular and terrible beauty, turns into a prolonged bark. Piled-up heads change into a baying crowd. Heads with different contours, arranged on one plane, transform themselves into a jigsaw puzzle in waving counterpoint. Heads enclosed in compartments become cages full of cacophonic sounds... The boundary of this activity is enclosed within a further boundary--of the picture itself--that is uniformly rectangular, and when I produced a series of paintings following this principle, in a smaller format than usual, I felt the need to show them all together, in order to form a coherent whole. Not only on account of their size and similarity but also because of the fact that, when separated, they failed to show the intensity required, while also manifesting characteristics of a serial metamorphosis developing out of a primordial matrix" (A. Saura, ibid.).
Christie's would like to thank Olivier Weber-Caflisch for his contribution to the research of this work.
Completed three years before founding the Spanish group El Paso, Antonio Saura's Polyptique Métamorphose presages many of the groups driving forces--principle among them being the promotion of advanced forms of painting developed in Europe and the United States. One of the first in Spain to champion Jackson Pollock, Saura formed an unprecedented dialogue between his native country and the New York art world through his numerous trips to the U.S. where he established influential relationships with Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline. "The initial blob creates a plane," Saura once explained, approaching his canvas with the same artistic fervor as his American counterparts. "A background appears. The first blob calls forth a second, the second a third. It is a fatal chain: freedom is at an end! One is no longer responsible, one becomes a kind of monster. As with love, at times. There is no doubt: to paint is sometimes to perform an act of love. But it is also an act of protest" (A. Saura, Recent Paintings, exh. cat., Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York, 1964, n.p.).
Suspended on twenty uniformly white canvases, Saura's dynamic, autonomous painting becomes a pivotal member of one of the most important series of the artist's mature oeuvre, where further members of this eponymous series are located in such prominent museums as the Reina Sofía in Madrid. "The first assemblage of these pictures--a polyptych made up of numerous shapeless faces," Saura explained, "looked like an antique chest, or a reliquary, or the niches in a cemetery wall, in which each compartment, separated from the others, contained a face fixed in its dynamic ecstasy, suddenly cut short and fossilized on the surface" (A. Saura, quoted in O. Weber-Caflisch, ed., "Heads , Metamorphosis" in Antonio Saura par lui-même, Geneva, 2009, p. 198). Expressive and dynamic the Polyptique Métamorphose series has most eloquently been described by Saura himself: "That snap of the head isolated in the void of a vast space soon turns into a cry. The head raised above an opaque barrier, suggesting a particular and terrible beauty, turns into a prolonged bark. Piled-up heads change into a baying crowd. Heads with different contours, arranged on one plane, transform themselves into a jigsaw puzzle in waving counterpoint. Heads enclosed in compartments become cages full of cacophonic sounds... The boundary of this activity is enclosed within a further boundary--of the picture itself--that is uniformly rectangular, and when I produced a series of paintings following this principle, in a smaller format than usual, I felt the need to show them all together, in order to form a coherent whole. Not only on account of their size and similarity but also because of the fact that, when separated, they failed to show the intensity required, while also manifesting characteristics of a serial metamorphosis developing out of a primordial matrix" (A. Saura, ibid.).
Christie's would like to thank Olivier Weber-Caflisch for his contribution to the research of this work.