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Lot Essay
‘Words are no help to me when I try to speak about my painting.
It is an irreducible presence that refuses to be converted into any other form of expression.
It is a presence both imminent and active.
This is what it stands for: to exist so as to signify and to exist so as to paint.
My painting is a reality which is part of myself, a reality that I cannot reveal in words’ (A. Burri, 1955, quoted in Alberto Burri: A Retrospective View 1948-77, exh. cat., Frederick S. Wight Art Gallery, University of California, Los Angeles, 1977, pp. 48-49).
Sensuous, tactile and absorbing, Bianco T was created in 1954 and is an historic painting by Alberto Burri whose importance was soon reflected in its provenance and exhibition history. Owned by G. David Thompson, one of the most legendary collectors of the post-war era, this work also featured in the 1957 touring show of Burri’s works organised by the great museum director and art historian, James Johnson Sweeney. Bianco T was therefore a witness to Burri’s burgeoning international reputation.
The rich white surface of Bianco T, with its cracks and crannies, flecks of red, and discrete passages of putty-like substances conveys an incredible textural intricacy that evidences Burri’s mastery of media. Here, areas of the picture may recall the parched landscapes of the deserts in which Burri served as a soldier in North Africa and where he was a prisoner of war in Texas. In Bianco T, this aridity is not derived from a painful origin: instead, it is an exorcism, as Burri stretches the versatility of his materials to new purposes, creating a sensuous array of textures that fill the viewer with a sense of haptic palpability. This is an image of healing, of optimism, as the humble materials are placed upon a pedestal and revered in their own right.
The variety in Bianco T is only increased by the other colours and materials present, which form crucial counterpoints to the white of the title. Created through a combination of Burri’s own exertions and the sheer properties inherent in the materials themselves, one sees a prefiguration of the Achromes of his fellow Italian artist, Piero Manzoni. However, Burri has not created a tabula rasa: instead, his work is a form of elegant, restrained cornucopia, boasting its wealth of materials, techniques and textures.
During the earlier part of his career, Burri’s work was celebrated in Italy and in the United States alike. He was sometimes considered a painter’s painter, as was reflected by the fact that it was that year that he was visited in his studio by a young Robert Rauschenberg. Despite their inability to speak each other’s languages to any adequate degree, Rauschenberg returned several times, and it has long been speculated that the increasing autonomy of his works of art owed itself to his experiences in Burri’s studio. Certainly, looking at Bianco T, there is a focus on the material rather than any reliance on representation that would be echoed in his Combines and other works. In Bianco T, the contents of the picture represent nothing: they simply are.
During 1954, Burri was also visited by the then director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, James Johnson Sweeney. Although already familiar with Burri’s work, which he had included in a group show the previous year, Sweeney was nonetheless impressed, and would come to orchestrate a number of exhibitions celebrating the artist, writing on him several times. Indeed, Bianco T featured in the 1957 touring exhibition that began at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, before travelling to the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, and the San Francisco Museum of Art. While Burri’s works had been shown in group shows in various galleries over the previous few years, as well as a few one-man exhibitions, predominantly held at Allan Frumkin’s Chicago gallery, this was one of the first occasions upon which a far wider public was exposed to his pictures. Sweeney’s own introduction to the exhibition discussed Burri’s use of collage, seen in Bianco T in the use of the various elements and even in the variegated use of paint, which resembles affixed elements: ‘Burri also speaks the language of collage. But with a vast difference from any of these predecessors. His expression is primarily sensual – as playful and as tightly organised as the best of any of the others – but primarily sensual in its approach to surface textures, colours and psychological associations in contradistinction to any primary cerebral, witty, or literary interest. Nevertheless this sensuality in Burri’s approach does not in any way preclude an elegance or intellectual organisation in the final product. As a matter of fact these are both striking characteristics of all that is most characteristic of Burri. Burri enjoys his art like every other true artist. He plays in it: plays with the materials he employs, allows them to play with him, to collaborate in the final expression, even to dictate some of the forms which seem his most personal. This ability to play unselfconsciously with his medium, combined with an unashamed, natural sensuality – both controlled and refined by an intellectual ideal for his work, a delicate sensibility and a technician’s competence and conscience – has made it possible for Alberto Burri to give one of the most individual and refreshing expressions of the past ten years and at the same time one directly in line with the soundest traditions’ (J.J. Sweeney, quoted in C. Christov-Bakargiev (ed.), Burri 1915-1995: Retrospektive, exh. cat., Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, 1996, p. 270).
The fact that Sweeney’s exhibition began in Pittsburgh may have related to one of the most pioneering collectors of the artist’s work, G. David Thompson, who owned Bianco T. Thompson was a Pittsburgh-based steel magnate who assembled a collection of astounding proportions during his lifetime; this included, at one time, one of the finest and largest assemblages of the work of Paul Klee, which later formed the foundation of a museum collection, as well as a formidable group of sculptures by Alberto Giacometti which was ultimately acquired by several Swiss museums. Thompson managed to buy works by artists already famous, for instance Henry Moore, with whom he struck up a friendship, and Pablo Picasso; yet he also championed artists whose works were often less known. Only a few years after Bianco T was created, the curator Alfred H. Barr, Jr. would use Burri as an example demonstrating the incredible ability that Thompson had to keep his pulse on the developments throughout the international art world. Recalling a visit to Stone’s Throw, Thompson’s Pittsburgh home, he wrote: ‘I asked him if he liked the work of Alberto Burri, at that time rather little known even in Rome. His reply was characteristic. He disappeared into a closet and emerged with his arms full of painted-and-sewn burlap compositions. Twice more he repeated the performance until there were a dozen or more works by Burri standing around the walls’ (A. Barr, ‘Foreword’, The Collection of Twentieth Century Paintings and Sculptures Formed by the Late G. David Thompson of Pittsburgh, Pensylvania, Parke-Bernet Galleries, New York, 1966, unpaged).
It is an irreducible presence that refuses to be converted into any other form of expression.
It is a presence both imminent and active.
This is what it stands for: to exist so as to signify and to exist so as to paint.
My painting is a reality which is part of myself, a reality that I cannot reveal in words’ (A. Burri, 1955, quoted in Alberto Burri: A Retrospective View 1948-77, exh. cat., Frederick S. Wight Art Gallery, University of California, Los Angeles, 1977, pp. 48-49).
Sensuous, tactile and absorbing, Bianco T was created in 1954 and is an historic painting by Alberto Burri whose importance was soon reflected in its provenance and exhibition history. Owned by G. David Thompson, one of the most legendary collectors of the post-war era, this work also featured in the 1957 touring show of Burri’s works organised by the great museum director and art historian, James Johnson Sweeney. Bianco T was therefore a witness to Burri’s burgeoning international reputation.
The rich white surface of Bianco T, with its cracks and crannies, flecks of red, and discrete passages of putty-like substances conveys an incredible textural intricacy that evidences Burri’s mastery of media. Here, areas of the picture may recall the parched landscapes of the deserts in which Burri served as a soldier in North Africa and where he was a prisoner of war in Texas. In Bianco T, this aridity is not derived from a painful origin: instead, it is an exorcism, as Burri stretches the versatility of his materials to new purposes, creating a sensuous array of textures that fill the viewer with a sense of haptic palpability. This is an image of healing, of optimism, as the humble materials are placed upon a pedestal and revered in their own right.
The variety in Bianco T is only increased by the other colours and materials present, which form crucial counterpoints to the white of the title. Created through a combination of Burri’s own exertions and the sheer properties inherent in the materials themselves, one sees a prefiguration of the Achromes of his fellow Italian artist, Piero Manzoni. However, Burri has not created a tabula rasa: instead, his work is a form of elegant, restrained cornucopia, boasting its wealth of materials, techniques and textures.
During the earlier part of his career, Burri’s work was celebrated in Italy and in the United States alike. He was sometimes considered a painter’s painter, as was reflected by the fact that it was that year that he was visited in his studio by a young Robert Rauschenberg. Despite their inability to speak each other’s languages to any adequate degree, Rauschenberg returned several times, and it has long been speculated that the increasing autonomy of his works of art owed itself to his experiences in Burri’s studio. Certainly, looking at Bianco T, there is a focus on the material rather than any reliance on representation that would be echoed in his Combines and other works. In Bianco T, the contents of the picture represent nothing: they simply are.
During 1954, Burri was also visited by the then director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, James Johnson Sweeney. Although already familiar with Burri’s work, which he had included in a group show the previous year, Sweeney was nonetheless impressed, and would come to orchestrate a number of exhibitions celebrating the artist, writing on him several times. Indeed, Bianco T featured in the 1957 touring exhibition that began at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, before travelling to the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, and the San Francisco Museum of Art. While Burri’s works had been shown in group shows in various galleries over the previous few years, as well as a few one-man exhibitions, predominantly held at Allan Frumkin’s Chicago gallery, this was one of the first occasions upon which a far wider public was exposed to his pictures. Sweeney’s own introduction to the exhibition discussed Burri’s use of collage, seen in Bianco T in the use of the various elements and even in the variegated use of paint, which resembles affixed elements: ‘Burri also speaks the language of collage. But with a vast difference from any of these predecessors. His expression is primarily sensual – as playful and as tightly organised as the best of any of the others – but primarily sensual in its approach to surface textures, colours and psychological associations in contradistinction to any primary cerebral, witty, or literary interest. Nevertheless this sensuality in Burri’s approach does not in any way preclude an elegance or intellectual organisation in the final product. As a matter of fact these are both striking characteristics of all that is most characteristic of Burri. Burri enjoys his art like every other true artist. He plays in it: plays with the materials he employs, allows them to play with him, to collaborate in the final expression, even to dictate some of the forms which seem his most personal. This ability to play unselfconsciously with his medium, combined with an unashamed, natural sensuality – both controlled and refined by an intellectual ideal for his work, a delicate sensibility and a technician’s competence and conscience – has made it possible for Alberto Burri to give one of the most individual and refreshing expressions of the past ten years and at the same time one directly in line with the soundest traditions’ (J.J. Sweeney, quoted in C. Christov-Bakargiev (ed.), Burri 1915-1995: Retrospektive, exh. cat., Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, 1996, p. 270).
The fact that Sweeney’s exhibition began in Pittsburgh may have related to one of the most pioneering collectors of the artist’s work, G. David Thompson, who owned Bianco T. Thompson was a Pittsburgh-based steel magnate who assembled a collection of astounding proportions during his lifetime; this included, at one time, one of the finest and largest assemblages of the work of Paul Klee, which later formed the foundation of a museum collection, as well as a formidable group of sculptures by Alberto Giacometti which was ultimately acquired by several Swiss museums. Thompson managed to buy works by artists already famous, for instance Henry Moore, with whom he struck up a friendship, and Pablo Picasso; yet he also championed artists whose works were often less known. Only a few years after Bianco T was created, the curator Alfred H. Barr, Jr. would use Burri as an example demonstrating the incredible ability that Thompson had to keep his pulse on the developments throughout the international art world. Recalling a visit to Stone’s Throw, Thompson’s Pittsburgh home, he wrote: ‘I asked him if he liked the work of Alberto Burri, at that time rather little known even in Rome. His reply was characteristic. He disappeared into a closet and emerged with his arms full of painted-and-sewn burlap compositions. Twice more he repeated the performance until there were a dozen or more works by Burri standing around the walls’ (A. Barr, ‘Foreword’, The Collection of Twentieth Century Paintings and Sculptures Formed by the Late G. David Thompson of Pittsburgh, Pensylvania, Parke-Bernet Galleries, New York, 1966, unpaged).