Remarkably, this is the first solo show in the UK of the work of Albert Burri (1915–95) for more than 50 years. Compare the popularity of other Italian postwar artists — Lucio Fontana, for instance, who only had one idea, the slashed or pierced canvas, to recommend him. Burri remains very much an unknown quantity, with a single work in this country’s public collections. A dozen Burris were shown at the Tate in 2005 in a mixed show of modern Italian art, but otherwise nothing. All praise then to the Estorick for mounting this enjoyable and succinct survey of Burri’s career: it introduces the general public to an artist well worth the attention.
Born in Città di Castello, the young Burri was a talented footballer with a taste for pirate novels. He studied medicine (a family calling) and qualified as a doctor before serving in the army. In March 1943 he was sent to Libya and was subsequently captured following the Allied victory at El Alamein. Deported by the Americans, he spent the remainder of the hostilities as a prisoner of war in Texas, where he began to paint. (In this he resembles the English artist Terry Frost, who always referred to prison camp as his art school and university.)
By 1946 Burri was back in Italy, determined to pursue a career as an artist, to which end he settled in Rome. It was there that he gradually evolved a new approach to materials. In 1948 he visited Paris and saw the work of Jean Fautrier, who used heavy impasto for his abstract imagery, and mixed thickening agents into his paint. The following year Burri began to use sacking in his own abstract images, and the liberation of this development enabled him to employ a variety of unorthodox (and apparently un-painterly) materials over the coming years.
Burri became famous for making rough collage-type paintings of torn and stitched hessian, a basic material he began to vary with admixtures of tar, pumice stone, wood, plastic and metal. He used colour sparingly, principally a palette of browns (his tonal range in sacking was considerable) enlivened with red and black. He liked the signs of violence done to his materials, and ripped hessian soon gave way to the controlled burning of paper, plastic and wood. Metal was fire-resistant, so he used it in sheet form and cut and curled it instead.
The latent brutality in his work inspired the critics to heights of imaginative interpretation, for few could resist reading a post-war malaise into Burri’s eloquent forms. The esteemed English critic Sir Herbert Read, for instance, saw the gaping wounds in the sacking, with their charred edges and rugged scars, as evidence of the artist’s outraged sensibility in the face of humanity’s urge to mass destruction. Burri himself preferred a strictly formalist interpretation of his work. For him, art was a beautiful game, and he played down the existential torment.
This was probably a sensible move. For even if Burri had started out with the intention of conveying the authentic wartime experiences of a doctor in an African field hospital, his growing involvement with the aesthetics of his art, with the materials for their own sake, with colour and pattern, soon took over and made what might have been truly felt look rhetorical. Nevertheless he achieved a considerable range of work in something like half a century of concentrated effort: art that embraced the geometric and constructive as well as the expressionist and emotional, that dealt with the classic as much as the romantic approach; and it is this achievement that the Estorick now celebrates.
The show occupies the two ground-floor rooms of the gallery, and begins with very early undistinguished semi-realist paintings before moving on to some bright and likable Klee-like tempera on card abstractions. But the initial impact is made by Burri’s mature work: ‘Sack’ of 1954, ‘Combustion’ of 1957, and further down the room, ‘Sacking and Red’ from the Tate, the solitary museum-owned Burri in England. Wounded bodies are not the only reference, the sewn lines of sackcloth suggesting the contours of landscape, but best to enjoy the abstract qualities of these pictures for themselves, form moving against form, texture against texture, colour with tone. The second gallery contains some fine shape-work on painted and collaged Celotex, the insulating board, and a couple of cracked kaolin pieces like dried-up watering holes. All rather enjoy-able, if hardly a demonstration that Burri is a major artist.
Burri did not inspire a school or a style but his work crucially intrigued several highly independent artists at formative moments. In 1953 Robert Rauschenberg visited Burri’s studio in Rome and later incorporated sacking into some of his own pieces. In England, Burri’s closest follower was Sandra Blow (1925–2006), who fell in love with him when she was living in Italy in the late 1940s. She was clearly influenced by his use of materials and for a time favoured tea leaves mixed with paint. Her work, however, never relied too heavily on Burri’s aesthetic, though to the end of her life she retained a keen interest in the application of collage and different layers of canvas.
At this point it would be appropriate to review a show of Sandra Blow’s work, but no enterprising gallery seems to have taken that particular initiative. Instead, let me mention two exhibitions by slightly older contemporaries of hers — William Gear and Frederick Gore. Gear (1915–97) was a Scot who, like many of his fellow-countrymen, found colour and pursued it with ardour. Living for a time in Paris, he was aware of the radical developments of modernism, and directed his own art down the paths of expressionism and then abstraction, showing with the European group CoBrA. An exhibition of his early works on paper (1945–65) is at the Fosse Gallery in Stow-on-the-Wold (5–25 February), ranging from the overtly figurative to the purely abstract.
Meanwhile, a select retrospective of Freddy Gore (1913–2009) is showing at the Gallery in Cork Street (until 3 February) and then at the Richmond Hill Gallery in Richmond (4–23 February). For those who only know Gore’s late works, the paintings from the 1930s and 40s may come as something of a revelation. Here are multifaceted rhythmical Cubist-inflected landscapes and still-life compositions, suffused with the rich warmth of the Mediterranean. Colour all the way.
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