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拍品专文
Piccolo cavallo filiforme is one of a small group of sculptures that Marino Marini conceived in 1951, featuring calligraphic, wire-like forms with which the artist appears to have drawn in space. The figure of the horse, Marini's most famous motif, has here been reduced to a core kernel. The 'filiform' technique that Marini has used introduces an incredible, elegant economy of means through which he has managed to accentuate the tension of the horse, its head rearing up in pain or in ecstasy.
Marini used the horse, and man's relationship with it, as a means of exploring his anxieties and feelings about the human condition in the post-war era, when technology had brought an end to the interdependence that had formerly meant that riders were essentially an everyday sight in much of Europe and the United States. In Piccolo cavallo filiforme, Marini has paid tribute to the loss of that ancient bond, invoking it through an expressionistic style that is at once highly modern and yet timeless.
Marini often managed to look both to the present and to the past in his works and their stylings. The jutting angularity of the forms in Piccolo cavallo filiforme recalls the emergence of several modern styles in the post-war world, for instance Informel in Europe and Abstract Expressionism in the United States. It appears no coincidence that Marini's works conveyed more of a jagged energy in the years following his first visit to New York when he was given a one-man show there, the year before Piccolo Cavallo Filiforme was created. The wiry stylisation of this sculpture seems to pay tribute both to the vital, pared-back energy of some of the Action Painters and also to the shard-like edifices that made up the highly-modern New York skyline.
As well as looking toward modernity in his works, Marini kept his feet firmly planted in the long tradition of European art, of which he felt himself to be an heir. As a native of Pistoia, he was in particular drawn to the archaeological legacy of his Tuscan forebears, the Etruscans. In Piccolo cavallo filiforme, the pared-back structure recalls the elongated figures of his Swiss contemporary Alberto Giacometti, with its silhouette-like simplicity and deliberately worked surface. At the same time, it is a modern reincarnation of the style embraced by some of the ancient Etruscan craftsmen, espoused in the sheer verticality of the famous sculpture in Volterra, the so-called Ombra della sera and by other figures of warriors such as the one wielding a spear held in the archaeological museum in Perugia, who could almost be the rider for Marini's horse. Marini felt that the Etruscans had tapped into a core truth through their reduced forms, and that he was adapting their legacy for his own modern yet universal purposes. 'I owe my love of reality to the Etruscans,' he explained. 'It is a realism which is demonstrated by forms which possess a primitive density but which are rejuvenated by smooth surfaces in which light plays its full part. It is only on the surface that simplification becomes distant from nature, in fact, since it searches essential truth, it comes much nearer to nature' (Marini, quoted in H. Read, P. Waldberg and G. di San Lazzaro, Marino Marini, Complete Works, New York, 1970, p. 492).
Marini used the horse, and man's relationship with it, as a means of exploring his anxieties and feelings about the human condition in the post-war era, when technology had brought an end to the interdependence that had formerly meant that riders were essentially an everyday sight in much of Europe and the United States. In Piccolo cavallo filiforme, Marini has paid tribute to the loss of that ancient bond, invoking it through an expressionistic style that is at once highly modern and yet timeless.
Marini often managed to look both to the present and to the past in his works and their stylings. The jutting angularity of the forms in Piccolo cavallo filiforme recalls the emergence of several modern styles in the post-war world, for instance Informel in Europe and Abstract Expressionism in the United States. It appears no coincidence that Marini's works conveyed more of a jagged energy in the years following his first visit to New York when he was given a one-man show there, the year before Piccolo Cavallo Filiforme was created. The wiry stylisation of this sculpture seems to pay tribute both to the vital, pared-back energy of some of the Action Painters and also to the shard-like edifices that made up the highly-modern New York skyline.
As well as looking toward modernity in his works, Marini kept his feet firmly planted in the long tradition of European art, of which he felt himself to be an heir. As a native of Pistoia, he was in particular drawn to the archaeological legacy of his Tuscan forebears, the Etruscans. In Piccolo cavallo filiforme, the pared-back structure recalls the elongated figures of his Swiss contemporary Alberto Giacometti, with its silhouette-like simplicity and deliberately worked surface. At the same time, it is a modern reincarnation of the style embraced by some of the ancient Etruscan craftsmen, espoused in the sheer verticality of the famous sculpture in Volterra, the so-called Ombra della sera and by other figures of warriors such as the one wielding a spear held in the archaeological museum in Perugia, who could almost be the rider for Marini's horse. Marini felt that the Etruscans had tapped into a core truth through their reduced forms, and that he was adapting their legacy for his own modern yet universal purposes. 'I owe my love of reality to the Etruscans,' he explained. 'It is a realism which is demonstrated by forms which possess a primitive density but which are rejuvenated by smooth surfaces in which light plays its full part. It is only on the surface that simplification becomes distant from nature, in fact, since it searches essential truth, it comes much nearer to nature' (Marini, quoted in H. Read, P. Waldberg and G. di San Lazzaro, Marino Marini, Complete Works, New York, 1970, p. 492).