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Lot Essay
Unlike so many of the early masterpieces of American Pop Art which focussed on the iconographic tradition of their commercial world, the movement's Italian counterpart was steeped in a sense and recognition of its rich artistic heritage. While Domenico Gnoli's White Bed, painted in 1968, is reminiscent of the works of, say, Warhol or Lichtenstein in its sheer iconic power, the painting itself explores his complex relationship with both modern and traditional trends in art. Gnoli does not merely bridge the gap, but confronts it, addressing the various issues that made Italian Pop art so complicated.
There is a Magrittean simplicity to the large depiction of a bed in this picture. The picture brims to the point of absurdity with the bed, which is presented as a vast, geometric plane of criss-crossed embroidery, articulated by a few mainly symmetrical creases and a tiny expanse of light blue wall. In a sense, this work recalls the Achromes of Piero Manzoni more than the bedroom still lifes of, say, Van Gogh. Despite this, Gnoli insures that we are constantly aware that we are looking at a figurative painting - however, it is a figurative detail enlarged to the point that it is stripped of all context. In this sense, the work superficially resembles an Achrome, but this is the product of Gnoli's quest to represent an extreme image of reality. The bed is presented on its own, spilling from the wall, raw and overbearing. Indeed, Gnoli himself made a point of distancing himself from the anti-figurative aesthetics so prevalent in Italian art at the time:
'At a time like this, when iconoclastic anti-painting wants to sever all connections with the past, I want to join my work to that 'non-elegant' tradition born in Italy in the Quattrocento and recently filtered through the Metaphysical school. It seems that the experience of those who wanted to interpret, deform, decompose and recreate has come to an end, and reality is presented undaunted and intact. The common object, isolated from its usual context, appears as the most disquieting testimony to our solitude, without further recourse to ideologies and certitudes' (D. Gnoli, from his Premio Marzotto catalogue, 1966, reproduced in Emily Braun (ed.), Italian Art in the 20th Century: Painting and Sculpture 1900-1988, Munich and London, 1989, p. 435).
Gnoli was reintroducing, in a manner linked to the Pop artists in the United States, the figurative tradition. He was re-enshrining the still life in its old place. While in terms both of the painstaking attention to detail and the techniques that he used Gnoli was much more the heir of the artistic canon than his American contemporaries, he uses this sense of continuity to strengthen his assault on the world and mind of his viewer, subverting the norm and thereby creating a contrast between the seeming conservatism of both bed and painting and the intensity of his artistic intent. By creating a painting that zooms in on a detail of domestic life, a tiny corner of our existence, Gnoli makes the viewer strangely self-conscious. We do not take the sight of a bed for granted in at all the same way that we would if the bed were presented in a room. The bed, the subject of the painting, has been stripped of all context. On the one hand, de Chirico's works from his pittura Matafisica period were characterised by strange juxtapositions, eerie scenes and anachronistic combinations of objects and animals leading the viewer to reevaluate reality, to cease to take the visual world for granted. On the other hand, Gnoli, by enshrining the bed in all its glory without any of the paraphernalia of the bedroom around it, without the intrusion of humanity, uses a different formula to create a similar effect. The viewer looks with fresh eyes on the bed, a 'common object' which has undergone a strange apotheosis, become monumental and epic instead of merely being a background object.
Beds featured in several of Gnoli's paintings, but often had the outline and a glimpse of the head of a sleeper within them, making the human as much a feature as the bed itself. In White Bed, Gnoli has deliberately chosen not to do this, instead concentrating the power of the bed by having it empty and unruffled. It is presented as an otherworldly landscape, devoid of people. There are no distractions for the viewer. Instead, we are made to inspect and appreciate the bed in all its glory. This heightens the sense of iconic potency that Gnoli has captured in the painting, the bed becoming a domestic landscape in its own right. This increases the extent to which the bed, shown on its own, heightens the viewer's sense of solitude. Not only is the bed empty, presented alone on the canvas, but it provides a weird barren domestic panorama, stretching off into infinity, confronting us with the essential solitude that is the final and inevitable conclusion of existential thought. Where de Chirico explored mysticism and the nature of existence on a universal scale, Gnoli is in fact exploring the bounds of his own existence, exploring the extent to which, even (or especially) when faced with a double bed, the ultimate symbol of togetherness, we are all irrevocably alone.
There is a Magrittean simplicity to the large depiction of a bed in this picture. The picture brims to the point of absurdity with the bed, which is presented as a vast, geometric plane of criss-crossed embroidery, articulated by a few mainly symmetrical creases and a tiny expanse of light blue wall. In a sense, this work recalls the Achromes of Piero Manzoni more than the bedroom still lifes of, say, Van Gogh. Despite this, Gnoli insures that we are constantly aware that we are looking at a figurative painting - however, it is a figurative detail enlarged to the point that it is stripped of all context. In this sense, the work superficially resembles an Achrome, but this is the product of Gnoli's quest to represent an extreme image of reality. The bed is presented on its own, spilling from the wall, raw and overbearing. Indeed, Gnoli himself made a point of distancing himself from the anti-figurative aesthetics so prevalent in Italian art at the time:
'At a time like this, when iconoclastic anti-painting wants to sever all connections with the past, I want to join my work to that 'non-elegant' tradition born in Italy in the Quattrocento and recently filtered through the Metaphysical school. It seems that the experience of those who wanted to interpret, deform, decompose and recreate has come to an end, and reality is presented undaunted and intact. The common object, isolated from its usual context, appears as the most disquieting testimony to our solitude, without further recourse to ideologies and certitudes' (D. Gnoli, from his Premio Marzotto catalogue, 1966, reproduced in Emily Braun (ed.), Italian Art in the 20th Century: Painting and Sculpture 1900-1988, Munich and London, 1989, p. 435).
Gnoli was reintroducing, in a manner linked to the Pop artists in the United States, the figurative tradition. He was re-enshrining the still life in its old place. While in terms both of the painstaking attention to detail and the techniques that he used Gnoli was much more the heir of the artistic canon than his American contemporaries, he uses this sense of continuity to strengthen his assault on the world and mind of his viewer, subverting the norm and thereby creating a contrast between the seeming conservatism of both bed and painting and the intensity of his artistic intent. By creating a painting that zooms in on a detail of domestic life, a tiny corner of our existence, Gnoli makes the viewer strangely self-conscious. We do not take the sight of a bed for granted in at all the same way that we would if the bed were presented in a room. The bed, the subject of the painting, has been stripped of all context. On the one hand, de Chirico's works from his pittura Matafisica period were characterised by strange juxtapositions, eerie scenes and anachronistic combinations of objects and animals leading the viewer to reevaluate reality, to cease to take the visual world for granted. On the other hand, Gnoli, by enshrining the bed in all its glory without any of the paraphernalia of the bedroom around it, without the intrusion of humanity, uses a different formula to create a similar effect. The viewer looks with fresh eyes on the bed, a 'common object' which has undergone a strange apotheosis, become monumental and epic instead of merely being a background object.
Beds featured in several of Gnoli's paintings, but often had the outline and a glimpse of the head of a sleeper within them, making the human as much a feature as the bed itself. In White Bed, Gnoli has deliberately chosen not to do this, instead concentrating the power of the bed by having it empty and unruffled. It is presented as an otherworldly landscape, devoid of people. There are no distractions for the viewer. Instead, we are made to inspect and appreciate the bed in all its glory. This heightens the sense of iconic potency that Gnoli has captured in the painting, the bed becoming a domestic landscape in its own right. This increases the extent to which the bed, shown on its own, heightens the viewer's sense of solitude. Not only is the bed empty, presented alone on the canvas, but it provides a weird barren domestic panorama, stretching off into infinity, confronting us with the essential solitude that is the final and inevitable conclusion of existential thought. Where de Chirico explored mysticism and the nature of existence on a universal scale, Gnoli is in fact exploring the bounds of his own existence, exploring the extent to which, even (or especially) when faced with a double bed, the ultimate symbol of togetherness, we are all irrevocably alone.