Enrico Donati Sculptures

A Brutalist Bronze Sculpture wall hanging. With a great patina and rough and polished textured bronze. From small edition of 6. Signed. Enrico Donati (1909 – 2008) was an Italian-American Surrealist painter and sculptor whose work also bore affinites to Abstract Expressionist art. Enrico Donati studied economics at the Università degli Studi, Pavia, and in 1934 moved to the USA, where he attended the New School for Social Research and the Art Students League of New York. His first one-man shows were in New York in 1942, at the New School for Social Research and the Passedoit Gallery. At this stage he was clearly drawn to Surrealism. Recognition of his abilities by the renowned art historian Lionello Venturi led to a meeting with André Breton in 1942. Impressed by Donati’s paintings, Surrealism’s founder and pontifical grand master pronounced him a Surrealist on the spot and mustered him, as a younger peer, into the august company of such Surrealists as Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, and Yves Tanguy. typical work of this period, St Elmo’s Fire (1944; New York, MoMA), contains strange organic formations suggestive of underwater life. Donati was one of the organizers of the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme held in Paris in the summer of 1947, to which he contributed a painting and two sculptures. In the late 1940s he responded to the crisis in Surrealism by going through a Constructivist phase, from which he developed a calligraphic style and drew onto melted tar, or diluted paint with turpentine. He also became associated with Spatialism, founded by Lucio Fontana. Thus began his long fascination with surface and texture, including mixing paint with dust. He began exploring this approach in 1950 when he discovered that dirt removed from vacuum cleaners and combined with pigment and glue before being applied in thick layers to canvas produced opaque wooly surfaces ideal for the dense blacks, luminous greys, and occasional whites he was now using almost exclusively in his painting, that culminated in the 1950s in his Moonscapes, a series that has similarities with the work of Jean Dubuffet. This work shared some of characteristics of work produced during this period by a number of America’s finest avant-garde painters. (Mark Rothko, in particular, springs to mind, as do Franz Kline and Ad Reinhardt.) Donati, however, had acquired this vision and had developed these characteristics for his art independently, without any concession to the vision or art of others. And so, quietly and on his own terms, Donati entered the mainstream of American art. Donati joined the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York, where he exhibited alongside Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Richard Pousette-Dart, and Theodoros Stamos, all members of the New York School. The fossil became a major theme for Donati through the 1960s, and he gave new importance to color in his Fossil works, for example in Red Yellow Fossil (1964; Miami, Hills Col., see Selz, p. 19). He was also associated with the Art Informel and Tachisme and Cobra Painters, Lyrical Abstraction, Outsider Art, Asger Jorn, Pierre Alechinsky, Nicolas de Stael, Karel Appel, Sam Francis, COBRA, Antonio Saura, Antoni Tapies, In 1961, he was given a major retrospective at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and frequently exhibited at group shows in the USA and elsewhere. He held a number of important teaching and advisory posts, including Visiting Lecturer at Yale University (1962–1972). Considered by some in the art world to be one of the last of the Surrealists, Enrico Donati died in his home in Manhattan on April 25, 2008, aged 99. Selected museums and collections The Museum of Modern Art, New York Guggenheim Museum, New York Whitney Museum of American Art, New York Museum of Fine Art of Houston, Texas Boca Raton Museum of Art, Florida Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Belgium Museum of International Center of Aesthetic Research, Turin, Italy Albright-Knox Art Gallery, New York The Detroit Institute of Art, Michigan University of Michigan Art Gallery, Michigan Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland· Newark Museum Association, New Jersey Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, Rome Mitchener Foundation, Pennsylvania Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Massachusetts The Rockefeller Institute, New York Johns Hopkins Hospital, Maryland Yale University Art Gallery, Connecticut Washington Gallery of Modern Art, Washington D.C. Tougaloo College, Mississippi The Israel Museum, Israel University Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley University of Texas, Austin Museum of Fine Arts, Florida Tacoma Art Museum, Washington The Lowe Museum, University of Miami, Florida High Museum of Art, Georgia Seattle Art Museum, Washington Weinstein Gallery, San Francisco, CA Vassar College, New York Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania Minnesota Museum of Art, Minnesota The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian, Washington D.C. Arturo Schwarz Surrealist Foundation, Italy Gallerie di Piazza Scala...