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Lot Essay
Spanning two metres in height and width, Grande particolare (Large Detail) (1963) is a superb large-scale example of Mario Schifano’s celebrated deconstructed landscapes. It was acquired from the major solo show Tutto Schifano at the Galleria Odyssia, Rome, in 1963, and has remained in the same private collection since that year. In 1974 it was shown at the Salone delle Scuderie in Pilotta, Parma, in the most important retrospective of the artist’s lifetime; the work has been further exhibited internationally over the past five decades. Executed in enamel, pastel and graphite on paper laid down on two canvas panels, it sees Schifano playfully dismantling a conventional pastoral scene. Against the raw tan ground, energetic strokes of white paint fill an assembly of discrete topographical sections, which are delineated by bold black lines. Each contains a stencilled label indicating its identity: cielo for the sky, alberi for trees, a closer section of terra or earth, and the work’s title in the bare foreground. Schifano’s brushstrokes range from dry to heavily-loaded, shifting in translucency and depth. A sense of swirling cloud follows delicately pencilled contours in the sky, while other passages are thrown into relief by their dark edges, which cut through the picture like lead lines in a stained-glass window. The join between the two abutted canvases makes for a horizon. Drips and splashes of paint add gravity towards the base, where the title underlines Schifano’s presentation of the work as a ‘detail’ of a larger vista. Far from an illusory image of an outdoor scene, Grande particolare is instead a complex, self-reflexive picture. Mapping its own materiality and the mechanics of its construction, it also exhibits the tactile beauty that is distinct to Schifano’s work.
Schifano was a leading member of the Scuola di Piazza del Popolo, a loose artistic movement that emerged in early-1960s Rome. In a break from the emotive expressions of Arte Informale and in contrast to their Arte Povera contemporaries, these young artists—also including Giosetta Foroni, Tano Festa, Franco Angeli and Cesare Tacchi—took a largely figurative approach to painting that was in tune with French Nouveau Réalisme and American Pop art. Rather than seductive, seamless surfaces, their works tended to emphasise the constructed nature of received imagery, often articulating the layered textures of the inner-city environment. Schifano would coat his paper in Vinavil glue to create a resistant, slightly glossy surface that amplified the body and gleam of applied enamel paint: works like Grande particolare reflect the language of billboards, road-signs and viewfinders alike. He was fascinated by cameras and television, and would later photograph countless TV screens—which he transferred to canvases housed in Plexiglas, and overpainted in psychedelic colours—as well as experimenting with a closed-loop broadcast system in his studio. His own brushwork, as well as his use of text and numbers, finds parallels in the cerebral, painterly proto-Pop of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.
In 1962, Schifano was included in the seminal International Exhibition of the New Realists at Sidney Janis Gallery in New York, alongside artists such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein: by that time, the influential Pop dealers Ileana Sonnabend, Leo Castelli and Janis were showing his work on both sides of the Atlantic. It was his Monocromi (Monochromes) of 1960 that had first brought Schifano to attention in Rome. These single-coloured paintings eschewed traditional decorum in favour of media like discarded wrapping paper, bare canvas and dripping industrial paint. Soon afterwards, he began to create subversive collage-paintings of the Esso and Coca-Cola logos. Often splashily sketched or isolating cropped details of the larger icon, these works placed the graphic and textual content of the American advertisements that flooded postwar Italy—he often designated them ‘propaganda’ in his titles—at a wry critical distance. Grande particolare relates to both of these important series. Schifano both reimagines the monochrome—perhaps even poking fun at his Milanese contemporary Piero Manzoni, whose white Achromes sought to empty the picture plane to a state of blank purity—and undercuts the landscape’s face value as a ‘brand’ or popular category of art.
Schifano’s embrace of the landscape was part of a wide-ranging and sophisticated inquest into the nature of pictorial representation. Just as Cézanne, Monet, Matisse and others had taken the genre as a vehicle for boundary-pushing artistic ideas almost a century before, so Schifano did the same, inventively subverting its clichés and components from a parodic, postmodern vantage point. Emphasising the fictions that underpin all forms of art, Schifano dissects and distils his Grande particolare so as not to depict a landscape but rather, as Claire Gilman has written, ‘the act and fact of viewing itself; the material means by which we see’ (C. Gilman, ‘Mario Schifano: Beyond the Monochrome’, in Mario Schifano 1960-67, exh. cat. Luxembourg & Dayan, London 2014, p. 15). Schifano’s trenchant vision—in dialogue not only with landscape painting but also with Pop iconography, the abstract monochrome and the screens and surfaces of everyday life—takes the measure of an era of unprecedented, image-saturated cultural production. At once viscerally drawn and critically conceptual, the work is no longer a window to the world, but instead reveals the raw structures, schematics and processes of its own becoming.
Schifano was a leading member of the Scuola di Piazza del Popolo, a loose artistic movement that emerged in early-1960s Rome. In a break from the emotive expressions of Arte Informale and in contrast to their Arte Povera contemporaries, these young artists—also including Giosetta Foroni, Tano Festa, Franco Angeli and Cesare Tacchi—took a largely figurative approach to painting that was in tune with French Nouveau Réalisme and American Pop art. Rather than seductive, seamless surfaces, their works tended to emphasise the constructed nature of received imagery, often articulating the layered textures of the inner-city environment. Schifano would coat his paper in Vinavil glue to create a resistant, slightly glossy surface that amplified the body and gleam of applied enamel paint: works like Grande particolare reflect the language of billboards, road-signs and viewfinders alike. He was fascinated by cameras and television, and would later photograph countless TV screens—which he transferred to canvases housed in Plexiglas, and overpainted in psychedelic colours—as well as experimenting with a closed-loop broadcast system in his studio. His own brushwork, as well as his use of text and numbers, finds parallels in the cerebral, painterly proto-Pop of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.
In 1962, Schifano was included in the seminal International Exhibition of the New Realists at Sidney Janis Gallery in New York, alongside artists such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein: by that time, the influential Pop dealers Ileana Sonnabend, Leo Castelli and Janis were showing his work on both sides of the Atlantic. It was his Monocromi (Monochromes) of 1960 that had first brought Schifano to attention in Rome. These single-coloured paintings eschewed traditional decorum in favour of media like discarded wrapping paper, bare canvas and dripping industrial paint. Soon afterwards, he began to create subversive collage-paintings of the Esso and Coca-Cola logos. Often splashily sketched or isolating cropped details of the larger icon, these works placed the graphic and textual content of the American advertisements that flooded postwar Italy—he often designated them ‘propaganda’ in his titles—at a wry critical distance. Grande particolare relates to both of these important series. Schifano both reimagines the monochrome—perhaps even poking fun at his Milanese contemporary Piero Manzoni, whose white Achromes sought to empty the picture plane to a state of blank purity—and undercuts the landscape’s face value as a ‘brand’ or popular category of art.
Schifano’s embrace of the landscape was part of a wide-ranging and sophisticated inquest into the nature of pictorial representation. Just as Cézanne, Monet, Matisse and others had taken the genre as a vehicle for boundary-pushing artistic ideas almost a century before, so Schifano did the same, inventively subverting its clichés and components from a parodic, postmodern vantage point. Emphasising the fictions that underpin all forms of art, Schifano dissects and distils his Grande particolare so as not to depict a landscape but rather, as Claire Gilman has written, ‘the act and fact of viewing itself; the material means by which we see’ (C. Gilman, ‘Mario Schifano: Beyond the Monochrome’, in Mario Schifano 1960-67, exh. cat. Luxembourg & Dayan, London 2014, p. 15). Schifano’s trenchant vision—in dialogue not only with landscape painting but also with Pop iconography, the abstract monochrome and the screens and surfaces of everyday life—takes the measure of an era of unprecedented, image-saturated cultural production. At once viscerally drawn and critically conceptual, the work is no longer a window to the world, but instead reveals the raw structures, schematics and processes of its own becoming.