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拍品專文
Domenico Gnoli's Pelliccia confronts the viewer with a tall canvas largely covered with rippling rivulets of colour which appear to flow down much of its expanse. Looking at these parallel wiggles of paint which descend the picture, which is over five feet tall, one is initially struck by the abstraction of the pattern, which is presented on a scale that can absorb the viewer. Yet looking at the picture in its totality, it becomes emphatically clear that this picture is anchored in the world of figuration, of visual reality, and in fact shows what appears to be a woman wearing a fur coat, what was, and arguably still is, an object of desire... Indeed, Yannick Vu, the artist's wife, recalled that she had so desired a fur coat, a seemingly unattainable luxury, that Gnoli had made this picture instead; Mario Tazzoli, who ran the Galleria Galatea in Turin where this picture would be exhibited in 1967, introduced Yannick and Gnoli to a fur dealer who made an exchange with the couple: the picture of a fur coat for a fur coat. Yannick wore her coat a great deal, including in the sub-zero cold of Russia, until it fell apart.
This story adds a biographical dimension to the deft combination of style, skill and humour with which Gnoli brought his fresh gaze to the everyday world, presenting it in such a way that it appeared magical - it is no coincidence that the author Italo Calvino was drawn towards his pictures and wrote a text about them. Meanwhile, the literary connection continues through the provenance of Pelliccia, that belonged to the author Frédéric Dard, who also owned two other paintings by Gnoli; Branche de cactus and La robe rouge were both previously sold at Christie's - the former work reached a world record price for the artist achieved at auction, which still stands today. Famous for the police novels Dard wrote under the pseudonym San-Antonio, the author collected several of Gnoli's works, which he valued particularly highly; while they did not meet during Gnoli's lifetime, it is a mark of Dard's reverence that he was thrilled in later years to meet the painter's mother. Gnoli was also mentioned in one of Dard's later novels, le mari de Léon. The quality of Pelliccia is also reflected in the number of important exhibitions of Gnoli's work in which it featured: this painting was shown in many of the early shows that made the artist's name, both during his lifetime and in the years immediately after his untimely death.
Gnoli dated Pelliccia 1966, yet it has been explained that this picture was in fact painted the previous year in Mallorca; it was only later, once he had taken it to Italy, that he dated it. It was shown later the following year in the important one-man shows that he had in several galleries in his native Italy. Several of his exhibitions during this period made such an impression on the critics of the time that Gnoli was offered a singular honour: a retrospective at the Kestner-Gesellschaft in Hanover in which Pelliccia was also shown. Writing to his mother about the news, he explained that this was all the more impressive a feat as he was the first 'young' artist to be given a one-man exhibition there (see S. Pezzato & D. Soutif (ed.), Domenico Gnoli, exh. cat., Prato, 2004, p. 217).
That Gnoli was accorded such an exhibition at that stage in his career was all the more impressive as it was only in the previous few years that he had developed what is now considered his hallmark aesthetic, with magnified images of the overlooked corners of everyday life. Gnoli had long had a rich and entertaining sense of and appreciation for the surreal, as is visible from the illustrations and which were published in a range of magazines. It was in the mid-1960s that he turned his eye towards the everyday world, zooming in on the oft-unobserved elements of our existence and celebrating them in his pictures. In this, he may have been in part influenced by his exposure to Pop Art during one of his trips to New York, where he would in later years come to know such luminaries of the art scene as Saul Steinberg, Sidney Janis and even Andy Warhol. However, Gnoli saw himself rather as a descendent of a very Italian tradition of painting, beginning with the Quattrocento so beloved by his art historian father and leading through to the Pittura Metafisica of Giorgio de Chirico, which itself would be one of the greatest spurs to Surrealism. Looking at Pelliccia, the tradition of Italian painting is perceptible both in the air of mystery so evocative of de Chirico's paintings and in the image itself, with the fur coat resembling the tattered rags depicted in images of St. John the Baptist and of the penitent Mary Magdalene, not least in Donatello's celebrated sculpture of her in the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo in Florence. There too the streams of the fur run cascade down the body, carved out of wood that is echoed in the brown of Gnoli's painting.
As well as tapping into the atmosphere of mystery that was so central to Pittura Metafisica, focusing on one aspect of the modern world and placing it in a new, celebratory context that allows us to appreciate the texture and appearance of the coat afresh, Gnoli also appears to have been turning towards more contemporary developments in art. While he eschewed the aesthetic and thinking that underpinned the work of his Pop contemporaries across the Atlantic, who celebrated consumer society and media imagery in their pictures, Gnoli nonetheless appears to have used the abstraction that occurs when one focuses on a detail and blows it up to a new, impossible scale in order to point a dig at such movements as Op Art. In Pelliccia, the undulating, arcing forms of the fur itself echo some of the contemporary pictures of, say, Bridget Riley, a comparison made all the stronger by his deliberately limited palette. At the same time, these shifting lines of colour can be seen as a parodic reference to the Action Painters. While the appearance of Gnoli's painting may deliberately court these comparisons, he remains diametrically opposed to the New York school of abstraction both in his meticulously worked surface, with the painstakingly-applied paint depicting its subject matter in incredible detail, and the fact that he has so firmly linked his painting to the figurative world, which indeed he exalts in this large-scale painting.
While Gnoli, who had a great, irreverent sense of humour, would doubtless have appreciated this barbed dimension to his work, Pelliccia and its sister paintings nonetheless have an immense sense of poetry. They are epiphanies, and the focus on a detail, deprived of any context, which is allowed to fill a five-foot-tall canvas, results in an image that is both familiar and deeply uncanny. The coat in Pelliccia is imbued with a new force, a new power. As Gnoli himself wrote in 1966, 'The common object, isolated from its usual context, appears as the disturbing testimony of our solitude now that we are without recourse to ideologies and certainties' (Gnoli, quoted in ibid., p. 217). In our more secular, modern age, the religious framework that provided so much comfort to previous generations has gone; Pelliccia is an altarpiece to the modern world which both celebrates its beauty and also reveals some of its flaws, providing an existential caveat that has only gained in relevance in the intervening decades since its creation.
This story adds a biographical dimension to the deft combination of style, skill and humour with which Gnoli brought his fresh gaze to the everyday world, presenting it in such a way that it appeared magical - it is no coincidence that the author Italo Calvino was drawn towards his pictures and wrote a text about them. Meanwhile, the literary connection continues through the provenance of Pelliccia, that belonged to the author Frédéric Dard, who also owned two other paintings by Gnoli; Branche de cactus and La robe rouge were both previously sold at Christie's - the former work reached a world record price for the artist achieved at auction, which still stands today. Famous for the police novels Dard wrote under the pseudonym San-Antonio, the author collected several of Gnoli's works, which he valued particularly highly; while they did not meet during Gnoli's lifetime, it is a mark of Dard's reverence that he was thrilled in later years to meet the painter's mother. Gnoli was also mentioned in one of Dard's later novels, le mari de Léon. The quality of Pelliccia is also reflected in the number of important exhibitions of Gnoli's work in which it featured: this painting was shown in many of the early shows that made the artist's name, both during his lifetime and in the years immediately after his untimely death.
Gnoli dated Pelliccia 1966, yet it has been explained that this picture was in fact painted the previous year in Mallorca; it was only later, once he had taken it to Italy, that he dated it. It was shown later the following year in the important one-man shows that he had in several galleries in his native Italy. Several of his exhibitions during this period made such an impression on the critics of the time that Gnoli was offered a singular honour: a retrospective at the Kestner-Gesellschaft in Hanover in which Pelliccia was also shown. Writing to his mother about the news, he explained that this was all the more impressive a feat as he was the first 'young' artist to be given a one-man exhibition there (see S. Pezzato & D. Soutif (ed.), Domenico Gnoli, exh. cat., Prato, 2004, p. 217).
That Gnoli was accorded such an exhibition at that stage in his career was all the more impressive as it was only in the previous few years that he had developed what is now considered his hallmark aesthetic, with magnified images of the overlooked corners of everyday life. Gnoli had long had a rich and entertaining sense of and appreciation for the surreal, as is visible from the illustrations and which were published in a range of magazines. It was in the mid-1960s that he turned his eye towards the everyday world, zooming in on the oft-unobserved elements of our existence and celebrating them in his pictures. In this, he may have been in part influenced by his exposure to Pop Art during one of his trips to New York, where he would in later years come to know such luminaries of the art scene as Saul Steinberg, Sidney Janis and even Andy Warhol. However, Gnoli saw himself rather as a descendent of a very Italian tradition of painting, beginning with the Quattrocento so beloved by his art historian father and leading through to the Pittura Metafisica of Giorgio de Chirico, which itself would be one of the greatest spurs to Surrealism. Looking at Pelliccia, the tradition of Italian painting is perceptible both in the air of mystery so evocative of de Chirico's paintings and in the image itself, with the fur coat resembling the tattered rags depicted in images of St. John the Baptist and of the penitent Mary Magdalene, not least in Donatello's celebrated sculpture of her in the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo in Florence. There too the streams of the fur run cascade down the body, carved out of wood that is echoed in the brown of Gnoli's painting.
As well as tapping into the atmosphere of mystery that was so central to Pittura Metafisica, focusing on one aspect of the modern world and placing it in a new, celebratory context that allows us to appreciate the texture and appearance of the coat afresh, Gnoli also appears to have been turning towards more contemporary developments in art. While he eschewed the aesthetic and thinking that underpinned the work of his Pop contemporaries across the Atlantic, who celebrated consumer society and media imagery in their pictures, Gnoli nonetheless appears to have used the abstraction that occurs when one focuses on a detail and blows it up to a new, impossible scale in order to point a dig at such movements as Op Art. In Pelliccia, the undulating, arcing forms of the fur itself echo some of the contemporary pictures of, say, Bridget Riley, a comparison made all the stronger by his deliberately limited palette. At the same time, these shifting lines of colour can be seen as a parodic reference to the Action Painters. While the appearance of Gnoli's painting may deliberately court these comparisons, he remains diametrically opposed to the New York school of abstraction both in his meticulously worked surface, with the painstakingly-applied paint depicting its subject matter in incredible detail, and the fact that he has so firmly linked his painting to the figurative world, which indeed he exalts in this large-scale painting.
While Gnoli, who had a great, irreverent sense of humour, would doubtless have appreciated this barbed dimension to his work, Pelliccia and its sister paintings nonetheless have an immense sense of poetry. They are epiphanies, and the focus on a detail, deprived of any context, which is allowed to fill a five-foot-tall canvas, results in an image that is both familiar and deeply uncanny. The coat in Pelliccia is imbued with a new force, a new power. As Gnoli himself wrote in 1966, 'The common object, isolated from its usual context, appears as the disturbing testimony of our solitude now that we are without recourse to ideologies and certainties' (Gnoli, quoted in ibid., p. 217). In our more secular, modern age, the religious framework that provided so much comfort to previous generations has gone; Pelliccia is an altarpiece to the modern world which both celebrates its beauty and also reveals some of its flaws, providing an existential caveat that has only gained in relevance in the intervening decades since its creation.