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Lot Essay
The elegant folds and ruptures that make up the surface of Salvatore Scarpitta’s 1958 work, Untitled, are emblematic of the distinct style of postwar art that emerged from Europe in the aftermath of World War II. Scarpitta, together with Piero Manzoni, Lucio Fontana, and others began to question the sanctity of the two-dimensional nature of the canvas, a tradition that had endured since the Renaissance. Stifled by these centuries of tradition, younger artists sort to devise a completely new form of artistic language. The result was a work such as Untitled; an evocative composition in which the traditionally inert canvas support became the primary means of artistic expression. Widely exhibited, including in the 2015 retrospective organized by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C., works such as Untitled radically subverted the very notion of painting itself, and anticipated the revolution in postwar art that was to follow.
Scarpitta’s pleats, twists, cuts and layering result in an animated and sculptural surface, packed with evocative compositional arrangements and spaces. Carefully constructed and meticulously executed, they create depth and space on what otherwise would have been a flat surface. The sculptural nature of the work is further enhanced by Scarpitta’s decision to render the surface in white monochrome. Evoking the luxurious creases of Bernini’s emotive sculpture The Ecstasy of St. Therese, the folds of Untlted suggests the classical tradition, but the transgressive nature of the manipulated canvas places it firmly in the contemporary oeuvre.
The impetus for Scarpitta’s distinctive style was said to have come from the birth of his daughter, Lola. Scarpitta took the bands of cloth that he used to swaddle his new-born baby and dipped them in glue to stiffen them before wrapping them around a wooden stretcher. On seeing this innovation fellow artist Piero Dorazio declared “These works impressed me for their originality and for their value as an extension of his experience of a painter; they represented the first case of a step forward after the provocation of Burri. So when Fontana came to Rome I took him to Salvatore’s studio…The next year I went to visit Fontana and his studio was full of canvases with the famous slashes, which could have only been suggested by the swathing bands of Scarpitta” (P. Dorazio, quoted in L Sansone, Salvatore Scarpitta: Catalogue Raisonné, Vol. 1, Milan, 2005 p. 68).
“Canvas: twisted, stretched, slashed, ripped taut as the hood on an ancient touring car, as the cover of a prairie schooner, swollen as a sail flapping in the wind, rigid as bandage, cheerful as tablecloth stained during a convivial feast…this alpha and omega of the post-medieval painter and of the modern artist is here in Scarpitta elevated to the material with which he works”(C. Vivaldi, “Salvatore Scarpitta,” Quaderni di Arte Attuale, Rome, 1959).
With his dramatic move away from the traditional use of canvas, Scarpitta was part the movement of avant-garde artists in Europe who sought to find a new direction for art after the destruction wrought by the Second World War. He found himself associating with artists such as Alberto Burri and Piero Dorazio, and even Cy Twomby (with whom he shared a studio between 1957-58), all of whom influenced Scarpitta’s work, and were in turn often influenced by it. Cesare Vivaldi, the Italian poet and art critic, praised Scarpetta’s innovative technique as a dramatic advance on centuries of classical European artistic tradition, describing the artist’s work thus: “Canvas: twisted, stretched, slashed, ripped taut as the hood on an ancient touring car, as the cover of a prairie schooner, swollen as a sail flapping in the wind, rigid as bandage, cheerful as tablecloth stained during a convivial feast…this alpha and omega of the post-medieval painter and of the modern artist is here in Scarpitta elevated to the material with which he works” (C. Vivaldi, “Salvatore Scarpitta,” Quaderni di Arte Attuale, Rome, 1959).
Often described as the bridge between American Pop and Arte Povera, Scarpitta was born in Italy but raised in the United States before returning to Europe to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. His work became a synthesis of the European avant-garde and the American bravado that came to characterize the period after the war. Untitled was produced during a pivotal period of his career and encapsulates the energy and dynamism that summed-up the post-war period and marks Scarpitta out as one of the most innovative and influential artists of his generation.
Scarpitta’s pleats, twists, cuts and layering result in an animated and sculptural surface, packed with evocative compositional arrangements and spaces. Carefully constructed and meticulously executed, they create depth and space on what otherwise would have been a flat surface. The sculptural nature of the work is further enhanced by Scarpitta’s decision to render the surface in white monochrome. Evoking the luxurious creases of Bernini’s emotive sculpture The Ecstasy of St. Therese, the folds of Untlted suggests the classical tradition, but the transgressive nature of the manipulated canvas places it firmly in the contemporary oeuvre.
The impetus for Scarpitta’s distinctive style was said to have come from the birth of his daughter, Lola. Scarpitta took the bands of cloth that he used to swaddle his new-born baby and dipped them in glue to stiffen them before wrapping them around a wooden stretcher. On seeing this innovation fellow artist Piero Dorazio declared “These works impressed me for their originality and for their value as an extension of his experience of a painter; they represented the first case of a step forward after the provocation of Burri. So when Fontana came to Rome I took him to Salvatore’s studio…The next year I went to visit Fontana and his studio was full of canvases with the famous slashes, which could have only been suggested by the swathing bands of Scarpitta” (P. Dorazio, quoted in L Sansone, Salvatore Scarpitta: Catalogue Raisonné, Vol. 1, Milan, 2005 p. 68).
“Canvas: twisted, stretched, slashed, ripped taut as the hood on an ancient touring car, as the cover of a prairie schooner, swollen as a sail flapping in the wind, rigid as bandage, cheerful as tablecloth stained during a convivial feast…this alpha and omega of the post-medieval painter and of the modern artist is here in Scarpitta elevated to the material with which he works”(C. Vivaldi, “Salvatore Scarpitta,” Quaderni di Arte Attuale, Rome, 1959).
With his dramatic move away from the traditional use of canvas, Scarpitta was part the movement of avant-garde artists in Europe who sought to find a new direction for art after the destruction wrought by the Second World War. He found himself associating with artists such as Alberto Burri and Piero Dorazio, and even Cy Twomby (with whom he shared a studio between 1957-58), all of whom influenced Scarpitta’s work, and were in turn often influenced by it. Cesare Vivaldi, the Italian poet and art critic, praised Scarpetta’s innovative technique as a dramatic advance on centuries of classical European artistic tradition, describing the artist’s work thus: “Canvas: twisted, stretched, slashed, ripped taut as the hood on an ancient touring car, as the cover of a prairie schooner, swollen as a sail flapping in the wind, rigid as bandage, cheerful as tablecloth stained during a convivial feast…this alpha and omega of the post-medieval painter and of the modern artist is here in Scarpitta elevated to the material with which he works” (C. Vivaldi, “Salvatore Scarpitta,” Quaderni di Arte Attuale, Rome, 1959).
Often described as the bridge between American Pop and Arte Povera, Scarpitta was born in Italy but raised in the United States before returning to Europe to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. His work became a synthesis of the European avant-garde and the American bravado that came to characterize the period after the war. Untitled was produced during a pivotal period of his career and encapsulates the energy and dynamism that summed-up the post-war period and marks Scarpitta out as one of the most innovative and influential artists of his generation.