Untitled

Born in 1909 in Milan, Enrico Donati embraced his passion for avant-garde music, training as a composer, before turning his creative vision to painting. Studying in Paris in the early 1930s, he first discovered the radical language of the Surrealists which, along with the sacred artefacts of Native American cultures he came across at the city’s Musée de l’Homme, had an enormous impact on his imagination. The artist spent several months travelling through the American Southwest and Canadian Northwest during the mid-1930s, immersing himself in the mythology and art of the Apache, Hopi, and Zuni tribes, before returning to Europe to complete his artistic studies.

In 1939, Donati moved his young family to New York to escape the growing threat of war, and it was through his meeting with renowned historian Lionello Venturi that his fortunes and his notoriety would flourish. It was Venturi who introduced Donati to André Breton in 1942, and in typical spontaneous fashion Breton pronounced the young Italian artist a Surrealist on the spot. Fascinated by the lyrical beauty and mysterious tension of Donati’s unique paintings, Breton proclaimed: ‘I love the paintings of Enrico Donati as I love a night in May’ (in Enrico Donati, exh. cat., New York, 1944). Introductions to the key figures in the surrealist pantheon – Marcel Duchamp, Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst and Roberto Matta, who similarly had relocated to New York in anticipation of the European conflict – soon followed. ‘I was just a kid,’ Donati later recalled, ‘… but Breton accepted me into the Surrealist movement. Suddenly I was surrounded by giants…’ (quoted in A. Jones, ‘Interview with Donati,’ Arts 65, no. 8, April 1991, p. 17).

Donati felt a kindred calling towards the exploration of the human psyche, notably the primal and often irrational elements which govern mankind’s actions as well as his creativity. He would explore his own unconscious in order to develop a Surrealist visual style often featuring imaginary scenes of nature, composed of atmospheres where the elements of air and water seemed interchangeable, and populated by amorphous creatures, floating or flying through these imaginary worlds. These sweeping panoramas, whose titles were often chosen by Breton, were depicted using a technique which welcomed the development of chance and accidental effect, lending the surface of Donati’s paintings an intuitive quality which requires close examination in order to fully appreciate the complexity of the image. In Untitled, an enigmatic, richly coloured form springs to life amidst the deep blue moon-scape, its bright glowing hues and shifting textures captivating the eye as it bursts forth in a great flowing arc. Using a nuanced play of vibrant tones which shift and move under our gaze, Donati creates an almost mystical sense of three dimensionality in these interconnected forms, as if he is conjuring a gateway to another realm or universe.