Alberto Burri
gigatos | June 2, 2022
Summary
Alberto Burri (Città di Castello, March 12, 1915 – Nice, February 15, 1995) was an Italian artist and painter.
He was born in Città di Castello (Perugia) on March 12, 1915, the eldest son of Pietro, a wine merchant, and Carolina Torreggiani, an elementary school teacher.
After graduating from the Annibale Mariotti High School in Perugia, he enrolled in medical school at the University of Perugia in 1934, graduating on June 12, 1940.
On Oct. 9, 1940, with the rank of second lieutenant corpsman, he was called to arms and soon discharged to undergo training at a hospital institute, for the purpose of qualifying to practice. Upon graduation, he returned to the army and, in early March 1943, assigned to the 10th Legion in North Africa. In the days of the Italian surrender in Africa, he was captured by the British on May 8, 1943, and, having passed into the hands of the Americans, was imprisoned, along with Giuseppe Berto and Beppe Niccolai, in the “criminal camp” for non-cooperators at Hereford concentration camp (in Texas) where he remained for 18 months. In the spring of 1944 he refused to sign a proposed declaration of cooperation and was listed among the “diehard” fascists. It was during this period that he matured the conviction to devote himself to painting.
He returned from U.S. captivity long after the end of hostilities, arriving in Naples on February 27, 1946, and living for a short time in Città di Castello, before moving to Rome, where he shared a studio on Via Mario de” Fiori, near the Spanish Steps, with his friend sculptor Edgardo Mannucci.
The first solo exhibition, favored by architect Amedeo Luccichenti, took place in July 1947, at Gaspero del Corso and Irene Brin”s La Margherita gallery, and was presented by poets Libero de Libero and Leonardo Sinisgalli. The works exhibited were still figurative in character with some debt to the tonal painting of the Roman School of the 1930s. During the days of the exhibition he met the sculptor Pericle Fazzini, vice-president of the Art Club, an important Roman art association also open to the novelties of abstract-concrete art: already in December 1947 he took part in the association”s second annual Exhibition and continued to exhibit with the Art Club until the early 1950s, both in Italy and abroad.
In his second solo exhibition, Whites and Tars, also at La Margherita gallery, in May 1948, he first proposed abstract works that, with their forms now amoebic and organic, now threadlike and reticular, revealed some affinities with the language of Jean Arp, Paul Klee and Joan Miró. Later he began to elaborate the first tars in which the qualities of the materials (they were made with oil, tar, sand, vinavil, pumice stone and other materials on canvas) began to take over from the simple formal organization of the composition.
At the end of 1948 he went to Paris where he visited Miró”s studio, saw the most recent abstract works of the Italian Alberto Magnelli, and became acquainted with what was being exhibited at the René Drouin gallery, which was emerging as one of the most important centers of the new artistic season, later called “informal.”
In 1949 he made SZ1, the first printed Sacco.
In 1950 he began with the series the Molds and Hunchbacks and used the worn-out material in Sacks for the first time. 1950 was a year of great experimentation, during which he painted several molds, exploiting the efflorescence produced by pumice stone combined with traditional oil paint, but also the first hunchback, with its characteristic bulge obtained with branches of wood arranged on the back of the canvas, and the first sack, made entirely with jute, patched and sewn up. Also in 1950, he executed the large “Fiat Panel” (a square of almost 5 m on a side) for the exhibition hall of a Roman car dealership.
In January 1951 he participated in the founding of the Origine Group, along with Mario Ballocco, Giuseppe Capogrossi and Ettore Colla. and participated in the group”s inaugural exhibition, which disbanded the following year.
1952 opened with the solo exhibition “Neri e Muffe,” at the Obelisco Gallery in Rome. In April, the exhibition “Homage to Leonardo” was held at the Origine Foundation of his friend Colla, in which he exhibited among others “Lo Strappo,” one of the first sacks that only a few months later was rejected by the jury of the Venice Biennale. Instead, the drawing “Studio per lo strappo,” purchased by Lucio Fontana, was accepted in the “black and white” section of the Venetian exhibition. On May 17, Burri was among the signatories of the “Manifesto of the Space Movement for Television,” promoted by Fontana himself. Later that year he moved to Via Margutta, to a studio adjoining that of painter Franco Gentilini and the Pincio embankment. In the same year Robert Rauschenberg, while spending almost a year in Rome, visited Alberto Burri”s studio, thus being able to see the Sacchi.
With the Chicago and New York exhibitions of 1953 the great international success began. The first U.S. solo exhibition (Alberto Burri: paintings and collages), held at the Allan Frumkin Gallery in Chicago, ran from January 13 to February 7, 1953; it was then moved to Eleanor Ward”s New York-based Stable Gallery at the end of the year. In the meantime, Burri had met the critic James Johnson Sweeney, then director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, who decided to promote his work through critical support, which resulted in the first monograph dedicated to him (1955), and the inclusion of some of his works in the museum”s exhibition activities. A month later, between April 18 and 30, a new solo exhibition presented by the poet Emilio Villa, with whom the collaboration continued in the following years, was held at the Origine Foundation.
The year 1954 was marked by moving to the studio on Via Salaria and joining the group of artists supported by French critic Michel Tapié, the father of Art autre. Toward the end of the year, he began to make use in his works of fire, producing his first small combustions on paper.
On May 15, 1955, he married Ukrainian-born American dancer Minsa Craig (1928-2003), whom he had met in Rome the previous year, in Westport, California. At the same time, the group exhibition “The new decade: 22 European painters and sculptors,” organized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, opened. (One of the artist”s few statements of poetics, which can be found in the related catalog, dates from that show. Also in 1955, a successful participation in the Roman Quadriennale and the São Paulo Biennale in Brazil.
Despite the successes and support of his friend Afro Basaldella, he was allowed to exhibit only two works at the 1956 Venice Biennale. However, in September, while the Biennale was still in progress, the Venetian Galleria del Cavallino dedicated an exhibition to him featuring many of his now well-known sacks.
Burri, meanwhile, continued to make numerous “combustions” (with wood, canvas and plastic) and experimented with the characteristics of wood.
The year 1957 was marked by numerous solo exhibitions in Italy and the United States. Toward the end of the year he produced his first Irons, in which he exploited the possibilities offered by the welding technique. The first of these works maintained compositional similarities with sacks, woods and plastics, while later Burri matured a more rigorous layout consonant with the characteristics of the new material used.
Exhibition activity was quite intense in 1959 and early 1960. In June Burri obtained a room at the Venice Biennale, where he also received the prize of the International Association of Art Critics. In the same year, during which he moved his residence to Via Grottarossa, outside Rome, Giovanni Carandente made the first documentary of his work.
A long journey between Mexico and the United States and the aftermath of a delicate surgery slowed his production, although he continued to exhibit in solo and group shows.
In the early 1960s there were in close succession, in Paris, Rome, L”Aquila, Livorno, and then in Houston, Minneapolis, Buffalo, Pasadena, the first anthological recapitulations which, with the new contribution of Plastics, would become true historical retrospectives in Darmstadt, Rotterdam, Turin and Paris (1967-1972).
At the end of 1962, the year in which he purchased the villa at Case Nove di Morra, near Città di Castello, he presented himself to the public again with the results of his last months of work. Between December 1962 and January 1963, the Marlborough gallery in Rome hosted an exhibition devoted to plastics that, after the irons, represented a new, and unexpected, turning point. Perhaps rethinking some mid-1950s plastics, he decided to focus his attention on transparent plastic film.
The new season of plastics lasted throughout the decade and Cesare Brandi was its main exegete: he introduced many exhibitions and wrote a fundamental monograph on Burri (1963).
In 1963 he designed, the first in a long series of ideations in this area, the set and costumes for five ballets by the American pianist, conductor, and composer Morton Gould at La Scala in Milan. in the same year one of his works was shown in the exhibition Contemporary Italian Paintings, held in a number of Australian cities. In 1963-64 he exhibited at the exhibition Peintures italiennes d”aujourd”hui, organized in the Middle East and North Africa. In 1964 he won the Marzotto prize for painting.
In the late 1960s he bought a house in Los Angeles (during this period and the subsequent early 1970s he still engaged in theatrical productions.
The 1970s recorded a gradual rarefaction of technical and formal means toward monumental solutions, from Cretti (earths and vinavil) to Cellotex (compressed for industrial use), while historical retrospectives followed: Assisi, Rome, Lisbon, Madrid, Los Angeles, San Antonio, Milwaukee, New York, Naples.
In those years he also began to work on cretins, originated from a measured mixture of acrovinyl adhesives with other materials used to cover the support (clay, kaolin, zinc white), on which he worked throughout the decade and which were exhibited for the first time in October 1973 in Bologna (San Luca Gallery).
An anthological exhibition held at the Convent of St. Francis of Assisi in May 1975 also offered the public a newly made cellotex, a material used in construction as insulation and made from a mixture of glues and wood sawdust.
In 1973 he began the Cretti cycle, and along this line came the concrete shroud with which he covered the remains of earthquake-struck Gibellina in a famous example of land art. In the same year, Burri received from the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei the “Feltrinelli Prize” for Graphics, with the following motivation: “for the quality and invention, even in its apparent simplicity, of a graphic work made with very modern means, which perfectly complements the artist”s painting, of which it constitutes not just a collateral aspect, but almost an enlivening that couples extreme rigor with an incomparable expressive purity.”
In 1975 he participated in Operazione Arcevia, a project coordinated by architect Ico Parisi to build from scratch a community to be built in Arcevia, a town in the province of Ancona, with contributions from artists, musicians, critics, writers, filmmakers, psychologists and local institutions. Burri made the sketch for the theater, now preserved in the Palazzo Albizzini Collection.
In 1976 Alberto Burri created (availing himself of the “technical” help of ceramist Massimo Baldelli) a cretto of imposing dimensions, the ”Great Black Cretto” exhibited in the Franklin D. Sculpture Garden. Murphy at the University of Los Angeles (UCLA). Another similar work, in style, expressive force and imposing size is exhibited in Naples, in the Capodimonte Museum. The most spectacular development was, however, represented by that of Gibellina (Trapani). of nearly 90,000 m² on the rubble of the old Gibellina. Work, which began in August 1985, was halted in December 1989 for lack of funds with the work not yet completed.
In 1977 he exhibited a major retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York entitled “Alberto Burri. A Retrospective View 1948-77.”
1979 saw the Cycles, which would dominate all of his later production, formed by ten monumental compositions that retraced the most significant moments of his artistic production, instead inaugurated the season of the great pictorial cycles, also made in the following years and exhibited permanently at the Ex-Seccatoi del Tabacco in Città di Castello. He would present other cycles in Florence (1981), Palm Springs (1982), Venice (1983), Nice (1985), Rome, Turin (1989) and Rivoli (1991)
In 1981 the Burri Foundation was inaugurated in Palazzo Albizzini in Città di Castello, with an initial donation of 32 works.
In 1984, to inaugurate Brera”s work in the contemporary sector, a comprehensive exhibition of Burri was hosted.
In 1994 Burri participated in the exhibition The Italian Metamorphosis 1943-1968 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. From May 11 to June 30, ”94 at the National Art Gallery in Athens the cycle Burri the Polyptych of Athens, Architectures with Cactus, is presented, which will be exhibited later at the Italian Cultural Institute in Madrid (1995). On Dec. 10, 1994, Burri”s donations to the Uffizi in Florence are commemorated: a Bianco Nero painting from 1969 and three series of graphics dated 1993-94.
Burri”s works are exhibited mainly in two museums in Città di Castello. The first, in “Palazzo Albizzini,” has an area of 1660 m² opened in 1981. The second hosting the artist”s “great pictorial cycles,” opened in 1990, is an unused industrial area, the “Ex Seccatoi del Tabacco” architecturally recovered. In Palazzo Albizzini, home of the Foundation of the same name, established at the behest of Burri himself in 1978, and in the Ex Seccatoi, inaugurated as an exhibition venue in July 1990, the artist in fact set up the collection he donated to his hometown. Through the museum itinerary organized in these two venues and the systematic catalog of his works, matured at the end of the 1980s and realized under his careful direction, he thus offered a precise reading hypothesis of his production in which large-scale sculptures also found a place, to which he began to devote himself at the same time as the great pictorial cycles.
In the early 1990s, Burri and his wife left California and settled in Beaulieu-sur-Mer on the French Riviera (France), continuing to spend the summer months in Città di Castello. Despite his advanced age he continued to experiment with new materials: his last work was Metamorfex, a cycle of nine works presented, by his friend Nemo Sarteanesi, in the Ex Seccatoi.
Burri died in Nice on February 13, 1995, a month before his 80th birthday. Known in life for his reserve, he had finally just finished a long autobiographical recording with Stefano Zorzi, who collected its contents in the volume Parola di Burri.
His works are exhibited in some of the most important museums in the world: the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome, the Castello di Rivoli, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Trento and Rovereto, Collezione Gori in Santomato di Pistoia
Alberto Burri”s archive is kept at the Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini Collezione Burri.
Alberto Burri”s documentary nucleus is small in size but quite significant and consists of the documentation found in his house in Città di Castello and in the house in Beaulieu, France, which was transferred to the Foundation”s headquarters after his death. The fund contains almost exclusively correspondence (letters, cards, telegrams) and photographic material (prints in b
Important exhibitions would celebrate his greatness in the years to come.A major anthological exhibition took place in 1996 at the initiative of the City of Rome at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, and which was then successfully replicated at the Lenbachhaus in Munich and the Palais de Beaux-Arts in Brussels.
On the tenth anniversary of his death (2005), it is the Scuderie del Quirinale that pays tribute to the great Italian master with an exhibition designed to show how his work made a profound contribution to 20th-century art in the international arena.The exhibition entitled “Burri. Artists and Matter,” curated by Maurizio Calvesi and Italo Tomassoni, realizes an interesting comparison between greats and hosts, among others, works by Robert Rauschenberg (probably influenced by the Italian Maestro in some compositions of the 1960s and 1970s), Antoni Tàpies, Lucio Fontana, Afro Basaldella, Joseph Beuys, Piero Manzoni, Anselm Kiefer, Damien Hirst, etc.
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