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Lot Essay
‘In sacking I find a perfect match between shade, material and idea that would be impossible to paint’
ALBERTO BURRI
‘... the truly vital thing that great artists like Burri, Fontana, Picasso, and Pollock give us is not so much material, a gesture, or a mark. It is an attitude toward life, the will and power to make art, the freedom to invent. This is the only lesson we can assimilate, the only one that regards us’
PIERO MANZONI
‘Not only are the miniatures my favourite thing in the entire show, but they transform how we need to read their larger avatars’
BLAKE GOPNIK
Spanning just over ten centimetres in height, Sacco e Verde (1953) offers an extraordinary microcosmic insight into Alberto Burri’s material universe. Intricately wrought on a jewel-like scale, it is an exquisite example of the Sacchi that occupied his practice between 1950 and 1956, and which stand today among his most important works. Across its compact surface, the artist combines passages of blood-red oil and vinavil with fragments of stitched and torn burlap. For Burri – a former army doctor – it was a medium that still hung heavy with the ghosts of war, and was among the first of many such humble materials that he would place at the service of image-making. Standing among his most remarkable technical feats, Burri’s miniature works form an essential strand of his practice. Beginning in 1953 and continuing for nearly three decades, works on this scale were sent as annual Christmas gifts to James Johnson Sweeney: the then-director of the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Housed together in what Sweeney would describe as his ‘little Burri’ gallery, these works offered tight, concise spaces in which the artist was able to observe and refine the language of each of his series – from the Combustione to the Cretti and beyond. The present work, with its rich variety of media and textures, may be seen within this context. Simultaneously a masterpiece of precision and an uninhibited zone of raw material expression, it represents the spirit of the Sacchi at its most concentrated.
Burri had first employed burlap while being held as a prisoner of war in Texas in the 1940s. Unable to practice medicine inside the camp, he turned his hand to art, working with materials provided by the YMCA. As supplies dwindled in the spring of 1945, Burri began to collect empty burlap sacks from the mess hall, initially treating them like canvases, covering them with a ground layer before painting upon their surfaces. However, his return to the medium in 1950 brought with it the realisation that this coarse, prefabricated material could – in many ways – transcend the expressive capabilities of pigment. ‘Up to this point the warp and woof of the canvas had only been a rhythmic texture in the painting’, wrote Cesare Brandi. ‘Burri took a step further: he established the texture of the canvas as the painting itself. An unpainted painting, in its pre-natal state’ (C. Brandi, Burri, Rome 1963, p. 26). Inflicted with scars and wounds, Burri’s burlap creations exceeded the parameters of representation. They were, instead, concrete facts: real objects with real histories, equipped to confront the traumas of the recent past. ‘Sacking’, Burri explained, ‘... is the compendium of the ideal psychological reasons, of the reasons of form and colour. I could obtain the same shade of brown, but it wouldn’t be the same because it wouldn’t contain everything I want it to contain ... It must respond as a surface, as a material, and as an idea. In sacking I find a perfect match between shade, material and idea that would be impossible to paint’ (A. Burri, quoted in G. Serafini, Burri: The Measure and the Phenomenon, Milan 1999, p. 160). In the intimate depths of Sacco e Verde, Burri gives powerful form to this notion.
ALBERTO BURRI
‘... the truly vital thing that great artists like Burri, Fontana, Picasso, and Pollock give us is not so much material, a gesture, or a mark. It is an attitude toward life, the will and power to make art, the freedom to invent. This is the only lesson we can assimilate, the only one that regards us’
PIERO MANZONI
‘Not only are the miniatures my favourite thing in the entire show, but they transform how we need to read their larger avatars’
BLAKE GOPNIK
Spanning just over ten centimetres in height, Sacco e Verde (1953) offers an extraordinary microcosmic insight into Alberto Burri’s material universe. Intricately wrought on a jewel-like scale, it is an exquisite example of the Sacchi that occupied his practice between 1950 and 1956, and which stand today among his most important works. Across its compact surface, the artist combines passages of blood-red oil and vinavil with fragments of stitched and torn burlap. For Burri – a former army doctor – it was a medium that still hung heavy with the ghosts of war, and was among the first of many such humble materials that he would place at the service of image-making. Standing among his most remarkable technical feats, Burri’s miniature works form an essential strand of his practice. Beginning in 1953 and continuing for nearly three decades, works on this scale were sent as annual Christmas gifts to James Johnson Sweeney: the then-director of the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Housed together in what Sweeney would describe as his ‘little Burri’ gallery, these works offered tight, concise spaces in which the artist was able to observe and refine the language of each of his series – from the Combustione to the Cretti and beyond. The present work, with its rich variety of media and textures, may be seen within this context. Simultaneously a masterpiece of precision and an uninhibited zone of raw material expression, it represents the spirit of the Sacchi at its most concentrated.
Burri had first employed burlap while being held as a prisoner of war in Texas in the 1940s. Unable to practice medicine inside the camp, he turned his hand to art, working with materials provided by the YMCA. As supplies dwindled in the spring of 1945, Burri began to collect empty burlap sacks from the mess hall, initially treating them like canvases, covering them with a ground layer before painting upon their surfaces. However, his return to the medium in 1950 brought with it the realisation that this coarse, prefabricated material could – in many ways – transcend the expressive capabilities of pigment. ‘Up to this point the warp and woof of the canvas had only been a rhythmic texture in the painting’, wrote Cesare Brandi. ‘Burri took a step further: he established the texture of the canvas as the painting itself. An unpainted painting, in its pre-natal state’ (C. Brandi, Burri, Rome 1963, p. 26). Inflicted with scars and wounds, Burri’s burlap creations exceeded the parameters of representation. They were, instead, concrete facts: real objects with real histories, equipped to confront the traumas of the recent past. ‘Sacking’, Burri explained, ‘... is the compendium of the ideal psychological reasons, of the reasons of form and colour. I could obtain the same shade of brown, but it wouldn’t be the same because it wouldn’t contain everything I want it to contain ... It must respond as a surface, as a material, and as an idea. In sacking I find a perfect match between shade, material and idea that would be impossible to paint’ (A. Burri, quoted in G. Serafini, Burri: The Measure and the Phenomenon, Milan 1999, p. 160). In the intimate depths of Sacco e Verde, Burri gives powerful form to this notion.