Enrico Donati Art

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...

Enrico Donati (1909 - 2008) Amethyst, 1982 Oil and sand (mixed media) on canvas 30 x 40 inches Signed lower right and on the reverse Provenance: Staempfli Gallery, New York Abell Auction, Los Angeles, Abell Quarterly Fine Art & Jewelry Auction, Oct 15, 2017, Lot 432 Private Collection, Berkshires Enrico Donati, a surrealist and abstract expressionist painter, was born in Milan, Italy in 1909 and died in Manhattan on April 25, 2008. He was known for his association with the surrealist movement of the 1940's, but his artwork continued to transform itself through the many trends that have occurred during his long career. In Italy he attended the Universita degli Studi in Pavia where he studied economics. In 1934, he moved to the United States settling in New York where he studied at the New School for Social Research and the Art Students' League. Considered the surviving dean of the Surrealist Movement and a member of the New York School, Donati painted with Max Ernst, Roberto Matta and Alex Tanguy in the thirties and forties, and in particular with Andre Breton, regarded by many to be the grand master of Surrealism. He helped organize the Exposition Internationale du Surrealisme in Paris in 1947 where he exhibited three of his pieces. The Surrealists were known to avoid presenting or representing reality, and put the emphasis on invention and creativity by uncovering the poetic aspect of life with its kaleidoscopic multidimensional images, using reality only to enhance imagination. Donati survived the decline of Surrealism in the late 1940's by adapting his style to current art trends as he worked with new materials and textures throughout the 1950's. One trend with which he became involved was Abstract Expressionism, which originated in the 1940s, and became popular in the 1950s. It was a movement in which artists typically applied paint, rapidly and with force, to large canvases, in an effort to show feelings and emotions. Paint might be applied with large brushes, sometimes dripping or even throwing it onto canvas. Abstract Expressionist work is characterized by a strong dependence on what appears to be accident and chance, although it is actually highly planned. Donati held a retrospective at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels in 1961 and went on to exhibit at the Betty Parsons Gallery with other forerunners of American Abstract Expressionism: Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Jackson Pollock. It was at this time that Donati created some of his most inventive and extraordinary work, some of which was featured in a survey exhibition at the Alter & Gil Gallery, Beverly Hills, California, in January 2000. He has held many teaching positions and has been an active lecturer, while continuing to add to his artistic repertoire. From 1960 to 1962 he was a Visiting Lecturer at Yale University, and from 1962 to 1972 a Member of the Yale University Council for the Arts and Architecture. He has had seventy-five one-man shows, among them an exhibit of new paintings at the Maxwell Davidson Gallery (57th St., New York) in the fall of 1997. Donati's work is held in collections throughout the world, and his work has appeared in over 300 articles and publications, two hard cover books...