Busto femminile di dorso (Female Bust from the Back)

During the last half-decade of his life, the Italian artist Domenico Gnoli developed what has become recognised as his signature painting style. Dating from 1965, Busto femminile di dorso is a perfect example of Gnoli's revelatory celebration of the details of everyday life, thrown into a new perspective by being shown on a huge scale, a detail of a woman's hair, neck and shoulders pushed towards abstraction by the close cropping of the composition and the patterning of the various elements. In this way, Gnoli managed to expose a magical quality to our everyday existence with a combination of both humour and of incredible workmanship. Gnoli continued to work as an illustrator at the same time, and so, because of his untimely death at the age of only 37 in 1970 and the meticulous attention to detail in his pictures, his paintings from this period are rare and all the more sought after. It comes as no surprise to find that Busto femminile di dorso has been widely exhibited, having been shown in some of Gnoli's most important one-man shows in commercial galleries such as his friend Mario Tazzoli's Galleria La Galatea in Turin and, posthumously, Jan Krugier's Geneva gallery, as well as his important museum shows in Brussels and Hannover.

The theme of the head viewed from behind was one of the first in which Gnoli pioneered his new style, focussing on one detail and magnifying it, allowing it to fill the large canvas, pushing it ad absurdum. During 1964, that watershed year, he had painted Mise en plis No. 1, showing a head where the hair is all in curlers; the human head, with the face remaining unseen because of the angle, was a subject that would remain central to Gnoli's work for the rest of his life, for instance in the side-on view of a man's head, Hair Part of 1968, now in the Staatgalerie Moderne Kunst, Munich, or Curl of the following year, now in the Fundación Yannick y Ben Jakober, Majorca. In Busto femminile di dorso, the vinyllike depiction of the gleaming hair that would feature in several of his later works is already in clear evidence, having been absent only a year earlier in Mise en plis No. 1. This underscores the abstract quality of the picture, with the Op Art-like undulations rippling down the shape of the head. Underneath, the trunk of the neck divides the hair from the baroque ornamentation of the woman's clothing.

That patterning highlights the debt that Gnoli owed to both the aesthetic and the craft of the Old Masters, in whose works he had been immersed from a young age, not least through the influence of his father, the art historian Umberto Gnoli, a friend of Bernard Berenson and the director of Perugia's museum. Certainly, the light in Busto femminile di dorso recalls some of the Quattrocento pictures of, say, Masaccio or Piero della Francesca. Indeed, Busto femminile di dorso looks like it could be a detail from one of their group scenes, which sometimes had characters with their backs turned within the crowds, drawing the viewer into the action using a device that would later be reprised by Caspar David Friedrich in his landscapes and René Magritte in his celebrated 1937 portrait of Edward James and many of his images of anonymous bowler-hatted men looking away into the distance.


That link with Surrealism is pertinent. After all, there is an atmosphere in Gnoli's paintings that recalls the Pittura Metafisica of Giorgio de Chirico which had itself inspired Magritte. A stillness, a timelessness and an air of mystery. At the same time, this cropped and zoomed image of the back of the woman, such an anti-portrait in one sense, also chimed well with the atmosphere of the times when Gnoli exhibited Busto femminile di dorso. When this picture was first shown in the Galleria La Galatea in 1966, it was in an exhibition which was well received by the press. This was in part because his pictures, which elevated fragments of the humble, everyday world, appeared to relate to Pop Art, which was very much in vogue at that point. However, critics were also swift to highlight the chasm between Gnoli and Pop, for instance Staephane Rey, when reviewing the Brussels exhibition in which Busto femminile di dorso was shown in 1968: 'This is a long way from Pop Art, thanks to an intelligence and interior poetry of an extreme ambiguity' (S. Rey, quoted in Domenico Gnoli: Ultimas Obras 1963-1969, exh. cat., Madrid, 1990, p. 68). Likewise, Paul Caso would write: 'We are inclined to think that the show of work by Domenico Gnoli at the Palais des Beaux Arts constitutes an event. In any case, it is rare for an avant-garde collection to derange so profoundly, by means of an unsettling simplicity which achieves such perfect results' (P. Caso, quoted in ibid., p. 68).