Domenico Gnoli’s ‘oddly touching and strangely poetic’ art

The artist Domenico Gnoli was the golden boy of Italian art until his untimely death at the age of 36. His heyday was the late 1950s and the 1960s, during the relatively optimistic post-war period, when Gnoli was at the centre of a brilliant artistic milieu that included Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg and Mimmo Rotella.

‘God, how beautiful he is,’ said Gnoli’s one-time girlfriend, the sculptor Barbara Chase-Riboud, observing that he often ‘ended up being the sensation of the evening, getting in the Italian newsreels’.

With his movie-star good looks and tousled hair, the artist conformed to the playboy stereotype. He was always seen at the right parties, and with the right people — the Rothschilds, the de Menils, and Richard Burton, who became a close friend. ‘No strategy on my part,’ Gnoli assured his mother, ‘just luck!’

This charisma was matched by an extraordinary talent and a furious work ethic. In his brief, dazzling career, he created a body of work that was in a class of its own. ‘No recognisable category can include the oddly poetic and strangely touching, semi-fantastic figure drawings by Domenico Gnoli,’ wrote the art critic Stuart Preston.

Gnoli always seemed destined to become an artist. ‘I was born knowing that I would be a painter,’ he said, ‘because my father, an art critic, always presented painting to me as the only acceptable thing.’

Born into a highly cultured aristocratic family in Rome in 1933, Gnoli was expected from a young age to be able to identify different artistic styles and imitate them. ‘Write down what you do and what you see, express what you think, because you always need to exercise your mind,’ advised his father Umberto.

He took lessons with the Symbolist artist Carlo Alberto Petrucci, and had his first exhibition of Piranesi-inspired ink drawings at the precocious age of 18. By 20, he was working as a set designer at the Old Vic theatre in London (he had arrived with letters of introduction to Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud) and flirted with acting, appearing on film in the historical melodrama The Flame.

In 1954, he moved to Paris, where he supported himself by providing illustrations for the Paris Review and Life magazine, and observed with bemusement the antics of the American expat community.

‘A hundred years ago, the artist was the symbol of tormenting solitude, the silent full moon, only wounded by the gloomy echoes of his footsteps in endless wandering,’ he noted. ‘Now, however, in Paris it is extremely difficult to pass as an artist by being alone. You have to be at least 30 years old, noisy enough to break the law… and you must have a well-developed and unquestioning clan spirit.’

Letters to his mother from this time reveal a young man with a fierce intellect and a tendency to overwork himself. He wanted to represent the sensuality of the world around him, and this took the form of hyperreal still-life paintings. ‘I isolate and represent,’ he said of his process, which involved selecting small, seemingly inconsequential objects such as a buttonhole, the corner of a tablecloth or a woman’s hairline, and magnifying them almost to the point of abstraction.

‘Would you call it surrealistic? Or abstract? I don’t know,’ he wrote to his agent. ‘All I know is that it’s a completely new theory about art, a new approach that makes the pictures appear just like life does. I bet this idea of mine is going to make a lot of noise.’

It did. Gnoli’s paintings celebrated the sensual pleasure of everyday life. He saw no difference between a lock of hair, the heel of a shoe or the collar of a starched shirt, and it was this egalitarian spirit that chimed with the Pop art of the era. Before long, he was being courted by galleries in London, Paris, Rome and New York.

Offered in the 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale on 15 October 2025 and Moderne(s), une collection particulière européenne on 23 October are two paintings by Gnoli from this key period: Bouton n. 2 (Button n. 2), executed in 1967, and the 1965 work Le Matelas.

Both paintings are tightly cropped, like a close-up photograph, and focus on pattern and fabric. There is a peculiar timelessness and absence of dramatic tension, echoing the work of René Magritte and Giorgio de Chirico. ‘I never actively intervene against the object,’ said Gnoli. ‘I can feel the magic of its presence.’

While his contemporaries Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein looked to advertising to populate their work, Gnoli’s practice was filtered through European art history. His paintings had the stillness of a Piero della Francesca and the exquisite flatness of a Renaissance fresco, which he achieved by mixing his paint with sand and glue.

In 1967, Gnoli retired to his studio on the island of Mallorca to focus on a series of pictures that were, according to his wife Yannick Vu, ‘the result of a prodigious solitary confrontation with painting’. Several of the works depicted the back of Vu’s head: fine, delicate strands of hair, curled or braided. When the paintings were exhibited in a solo show at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York in December 1969, the response was resoundingly positive. Gnoli had carved out a unique position for himself, anticipating the rise of Conceptualism and Hyperrealism.

Tragically, three months later, Gnoli was dead, having suffered from cancer. In an interview given shortly before his death, he said, ‘For me imagination, invention cannot generate something more important, more beautiful and more terrifying than the common object, amplified by the attention that we give it.’