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Lot Essay
With its combination of stitching and painting, Sacco e rosso reveals a direct engagement with life, both in terms of the artist and the viewer. Burri has incorporated elements from the world at large into his work, and has crucially stitched them together, a restorative and intimate process that adds texture and a sense of time to the work while also underlining the artist's own interaction with the various component parts. Rather than represent the world at large through figurative means, in Sacco e rosso, executed in 1959, Burri has included fragments of it in his work. The play of contrasts between the textures and colours of the burlap and acrylic in the picture bring the viewer's attention to the qualities of each of the elements. In terms of both aesthetics and of tactility, Sacco e rosso is a sensuous work that encourages us to interact with its constituent parts, an effect that is heightened by the artist's sensitivity to composition: it is no surprise to find that one of the artists whose work Burri valued most was Mark Rothko. Here, the fields of red, black and sacking have been arranged with a simplicity that verges on formality, each element thrusting the other into bold relief.
Burri had become increasingly interested in art during his time as a prisoner of war, interned by the Americans in Hereford, Texas. He had been captured on service in Italy, where he was a medical officer. During his imprisonment, he ceased to practice medicine, instead focussing on art. What began as a leisure activity introduced by his captors soon became a vocation. Burri's early works, many of which he subsequently destroyed, were figurative, especially landscapes. The forms within these landscapes gradually became more and more abstract and compositionally complex until, in 1949, he created SZ1. There, the various forms were replaced with collage elements, especially the burlap of sacking. This material had deep resonances for the artist partly because it had occasionally served as a support for the paintings he created in his POW camp, and partly because it so perfectly encapsulated the atmosphere of Post-War Italy. Burri had returned home to a country ravaged by war, a country that could not provide enough food for its inhabitants and instead relied heavily on charity. Burri's Sacchi often incorporate the burlap bags that were a part of this relief effort, making them very much a product of a historical moment. The coarse texture of the cloth, made all the more apparent through its patching and stitching in Sacco e rosso, was itself a reflection of the tattered state of Italy during the 1940s and 1950s. Even the limited use of colour-- the black and the red-- hints at violence, blood, desolation, decay.
The Second World War, and the horrors that were enacted during it, marked a certain loss of innocence both for the world at large and for Burri himself. He had been a prisoner; his brother had lost his life on the Russian front. In a very personal sense, Burri's pictures confront a similar dilemma to that contained in Theodor Adorno's statement that to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric. Burri has discarded all cosmetic and confected notions of beauty and artifice. He has instead engaged with his materials, incorporating them directly in his work. He has taken some small rough shards of the world and presented them to us in a new context, encouraging our appreciation of the material world in which we live. Sacco e rosso condenses the existential angst of the day into a novel pictorial form that has a relevance that many other art forms and movements no longer had.
In Burri's works, there is no sense of superfluous representation-- Sacco e rosso contains shards of the world itself. It is, in this way, autonomous. It does not refer to the outside world but instead contains a fragment of it. Why mimic the appearance of something when it exists in reality? 'Sacking,' Burri explained,
"... is the compendium of the ideal psychological reasons, of the reasons of form and colour. I could obtain the same shade of brown, but it wouldn't be the same because it wouldn't contain everything I want it to contain... It must respond as a surface, as a material, and as an idea. In sacking I find a perfect match between shade, material and idea that would be impossible to paint" (Burri, quoted in G. Serafini, Burri: The Measure and the Phenomenon, Milan 1999, p. 160).
By placing elements of the real world within the frame of a picture, in the context of an artwork, Burri created a poetic capsule of reality. This is not merely intellectual: with its composition and the rich contrasts between the colour fields and the rough and worn sacking, Burri engages the viewer's senses, prompting a reaction that is visceral, forcing us to reflect upon the textures of the world at large. The sense of the picture's autonomous status as an object that exists in its own right, without recourse or reference to the world beyond its bounds, is even reinforced by the title, which is a simple description of the material and colour in the work, heightening the extent to which Sacco e rosso is self-contained, rather than self-referential. As Burri said, 'Everything is already present in the painting' (Burri, quoted in Serafini, Ibid., p. 114).
This provided a stark contrast to the tradition of aesthetics and beauty with which Italy was traditionally associated. Burri has exploded the staid and outmoded methods of painting and of artistic activity. Instead of oil on canvas, he incorporates raw cloth and acrylic. Instead of using a brush, he stitches. On the one hand, this adds to the rough texture of the burlap in Sacco e rosso, while also serving as a restorative act that some people have seen as related to his former practice as a doctor. The stitching is part of a healing process that Burri oversees, helping to mend Italy, art, and even himself. The stitching also charts the passing of time. The activity of the artist himself is clearly evident in the looping mends that articulate the surface of Sacco e rosso, making this work an existential declaration by Burri, the incontrovertible evidence of a moment-- historical and personal-- that has been lived by the artist. Sacco e rosso is a stark proof of life. With its tears and mends, its rawness, Sacco e rosso is redolent with a sense of fragility, of the makeshift and threadbare nature of beauty in our troubled modern times. Both this and the intense sense of objecthood that mark Burri's works would come to have huge ramifications for artists throughout the world. He was an artist's artist, and inspired and was admired by people as diverse as Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein and Robert Rauscenberg, as well as being considered the progenitor of the entire Arte Povera movement.
Burri had become increasingly interested in art during his time as a prisoner of war, interned by the Americans in Hereford, Texas. He had been captured on service in Italy, where he was a medical officer. During his imprisonment, he ceased to practice medicine, instead focussing on art. What began as a leisure activity introduced by his captors soon became a vocation. Burri's early works, many of which he subsequently destroyed, were figurative, especially landscapes. The forms within these landscapes gradually became more and more abstract and compositionally complex until, in 1949, he created SZ1. There, the various forms were replaced with collage elements, especially the burlap of sacking. This material had deep resonances for the artist partly because it had occasionally served as a support for the paintings he created in his POW camp, and partly because it so perfectly encapsulated the atmosphere of Post-War Italy. Burri had returned home to a country ravaged by war, a country that could not provide enough food for its inhabitants and instead relied heavily on charity. Burri's Sacchi often incorporate the burlap bags that were a part of this relief effort, making them very much a product of a historical moment. The coarse texture of the cloth, made all the more apparent through its patching and stitching in Sacco e rosso, was itself a reflection of the tattered state of Italy during the 1940s and 1950s. Even the limited use of colour-- the black and the red-- hints at violence, blood, desolation, decay.
The Second World War, and the horrors that were enacted during it, marked a certain loss of innocence both for the world at large and for Burri himself. He had been a prisoner; his brother had lost his life on the Russian front. In a very personal sense, Burri's pictures confront a similar dilemma to that contained in Theodor Adorno's statement that to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric. Burri has discarded all cosmetic and confected notions of beauty and artifice. He has instead engaged with his materials, incorporating them directly in his work. He has taken some small rough shards of the world and presented them to us in a new context, encouraging our appreciation of the material world in which we live. Sacco e rosso condenses the existential angst of the day into a novel pictorial form that has a relevance that many other art forms and movements no longer had.
In Burri's works, there is no sense of superfluous representation-- Sacco e rosso contains shards of the world itself. It is, in this way, autonomous. It does not refer to the outside world but instead contains a fragment of it. Why mimic the appearance of something when it exists in reality? 'Sacking,' Burri explained,
"... is the compendium of the ideal psychological reasons, of the reasons of form and colour. I could obtain the same shade of brown, but it wouldn't be the same because it wouldn't contain everything I want it to contain... It must respond as a surface, as a material, and as an idea. In sacking I find a perfect match between shade, material and idea that would be impossible to paint" (Burri, quoted in G. Serafini, Burri: The Measure and the Phenomenon, Milan 1999, p. 160).
By placing elements of the real world within the frame of a picture, in the context of an artwork, Burri created a poetic capsule of reality. This is not merely intellectual: with its composition and the rich contrasts between the colour fields and the rough and worn sacking, Burri engages the viewer's senses, prompting a reaction that is visceral, forcing us to reflect upon the textures of the world at large. The sense of the picture's autonomous status as an object that exists in its own right, without recourse or reference to the world beyond its bounds, is even reinforced by the title, which is a simple description of the material and colour in the work, heightening the extent to which Sacco e rosso is self-contained, rather than self-referential. As Burri said, 'Everything is already present in the painting' (Burri, quoted in Serafini, Ibid., p. 114).
This provided a stark contrast to the tradition of aesthetics and beauty with which Italy was traditionally associated. Burri has exploded the staid and outmoded methods of painting and of artistic activity. Instead of oil on canvas, he incorporates raw cloth and acrylic. Instead of using a brush, he stitches. On the one hand, this adds to the rough texture of the burlap in Sacco e rosso, while also serving as a restorative act that some people have seen as related to his former practice as a doctor. The stitching is part of a healing process that Burri oversees, helping to mend Italy, art, and even himself. The stitching also charts the passing of time. The activity of the artist himself is clearly evident in the looping mends that articulate the surface of Sacco e rosso, making this work an existential declaration by Burri, the incontrovertible evidence of a moment-- historical and personal-- that has been lived by the artist. Sacco e rosso is a stark proof of life. With its tears and mends, its rawness, Sacco e rosso is redolent with a sense of fragility, of the makeshift and threadbare nature of beauty in our troubled modern times. Both this and the intense sense of objecthood that mark Burri's works would come to have huge ramifications for artists throughout the world. He was an artist's artist, and inspired and was admired by people as diverse as Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein and Robert Rauscenberg, as well as being considered the progenitor of the entire Arte Povera movement.