Lot Essay
Facts first: Antonio Berni was born in 1905 in Rosario, one of the largest cities in Argentina. He had his first exhibition at the age of fifteen, and five years later traveled to Europe on a scholarship. After several months in Madrid, he took up residence in Paris during the winter of 1926, and returned to Argentina at the end of 1930. He would continue to live there until his death in 1981.
If the adolescent painter leaned towards a peculiar post-Impressionism in Rosario,in Madrid and Paris he would create his re-interpretations of Cubism and especially Fauvism. Berni neither copied nor imitated, he was neither an inheritor nor a follower; in his canvases we always find a predominance of a unique expressive force that governs forms and color, and transcends them.
Around 1928, the young artist entered in contact with the Surrealist Group, through Louis Aragon, and came to know the ideas of Marx thanks to Henri Lefvre. On this path he would come to be a leftist, and from that stance--beginning in 1934--he would transform his painting into political art. He would initiate this trend in Argentina, placing these creations amidst the most eminent examples of this ideological tendency in Latin America, where he would be recognized as a master.
With regards to Surrealism, he would assimilate it into his painting between 1930 and 1932. But the Surrealist art of Berni does not belong to either of the two great tendencies of the first stage of Surrealism: the Automatism of Mir, Ernst and Masson, and the oniric interest of Dal and Tanguy. Berni, like Ren Magritte, takes up residence in the metaphysical painting of Giorgio di Chirico.
But if Berni takes up metaphysical painting it is to infuse new content into it. This will give it a consciousness that will absolve it of all indifference and will pledge it in an anguished, convulsed, and often times ironic and bitter vision of contemporary reality. Once again, back in Argentina the artist would take up residence in Rosario, where he exhibited his Surrealist creations in the galleries of the Asociacin Amigos del Arte in Buenos Aires. This exhibition was formed by 15 works, in some of which--like Susana y el viejo--the artist had employed the technique of the collage.
This was the first Surrealist exhibition ever held in Latin America, as well as the first exhibition of collages. All for naught: "The public," Berni would declare later, "was not prepared to accept the form and spirit of those works, nor were the critics, who rejected them outright." The profound political, economic and social crisis of the 1930s in Argentina led him to abandon Surrealism--although according to the artist, he never "abandoned it completely," allowing him to confront the real drama of his country and his era.
In his first paintings of 1931-32, objects and architectural spaces dominate the figures, canceling or disintegrating them, within a desolate, anguished universe. "The dream of reason produces monsters," Goya had demonstrated, and Berni transformed things and beings into monsters. Simple things: spoons, forks, weights, dominos, pins, clips, keys, nuts, buttons, dice, locks and clothe fasteners co-exist in his canvases as deletrious presences that question man, who has created them, and who must now surrender before them.
In such a sense Susana y el viejo is an exception within the Surrealist creations by Berni. Here he awakens the erotic vein that will manifest itself once again--after a long absence--in the 1960's and 1970's Ramona Montiel series. In his own fashion the painter secularizes one of the most disseminated stories of the Book of Daniel (chapter XIII); that of the chaste Susana, desired by two elders who secretly spy on her in the garden and want her to yield to them.
This canvas, painted in Rosario in 1931, a city then celebrated for its bordello life and its active Italian mafia, the artist displays Susana's nakedness with an evident idle delight, as does Manet with his Olympia. This frontal nude, occupying the greater part of the composition, is only seen by the spectator. The presence of the elder is alomost non-existant: just his face is seen, truncated by the door from where he seems to emerge, at a height that dwarfs him. Such an explosion of the unexpected, so common in Berni's Surrealist works, is fulfilled when we, the spectators, are able to contemplate the abundant nudity of this woman, and observe that the elder does not look at Susana at all. Forty-five years later, in El sueo de Ramona (Ramona's Dream, 1977), a vast oil-collage on panel, Berni returned to the subject matter of Susana y el viejo. In the realism of this specific work we find the inspiration of a Surrealist imagination.
Jorge Glusberg
Director, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes
Buenos Aires, March 1998
Translated by Dr. Wayne H. Finke
If the adolescent painter leaned towards a peculiar post-Impressionism in Rosario,in Madrid and Paris he would create his re-interpretations of Cubism and especially Fauvism. Berni neither copied nor imitated, he was neither an inheritor nor a follower; in his canvases we always find a predominance of a unique expressive force that governs forms and color, and transcends them.
Around 1928, the young artist entered in contact with the Surrealist Group, through Louis Aragon, and came to know the ideas of Marx thanks to Henri Lefvre. On this path he would come to be a leftist, and from that stance--beginning in 1934--he would transform his painting into political art. He would initiate this trend in Argentina, placing these creations amidst the most eminent examples of this ideological tendency in Latin America, where he would be recognized as a master.
With regards to Surrealism, he would assimilate it into his painting between 1930 and 1932. But the Surrealist art of Berni does not belong to either of the two great tendencies of the first stage of Surrealism: the Automatism of Mir, Ernst and Masson, and the oniric interest of Dal and Tanguy. Berni, like Ren Magritte, takes up residence in the metaphysical painting of Giorgio di Chirico.
But if Berni takes up metaphysical painting it is to infuse new content into it. This will give it a consciousness that will absolve it of all indifference and will pledge it in an anguished, convulsed, and often times ironic and bitter vision of contemporary reality. Once again, back in Argentina the artist would take up residence in Rosario, where he exhibited his Surrealist creations in the galleries of the Asociacin Amigos del Arte in Buenos Aires. This exhibition was formed by 15 works, in some of which--like Susana y el viejo--the artist had employed the technique of the collage.
This was the first Surrealist exhibition ever held in Latin America, as well as the first exhibition of collages. All for naught: "The public," Berni would declare later, "was not prepared to accept the form and spirit of those works, nor were the critics, who rejected them outright." The profound political, economic and social crisis of the 1930s in Argentina led him to abandon Surrealism--although according to the artist, he never "abandoned it completely," allowing him to confront the real drama of his country and his era.
In his first paintings of 1931-32, objects and architectural spaces dominate the figures, canceling or disintegrating them, within a desolate, anguished universe. "The dream of reason produces monsters," Goya had demonstrated, and Berni transformed things and beings into monsters. Simple things: spoons, forks, weights, dominos, pins, clips, keys, nuts, buttons, dice, locks and clothe fasteners co-exist in his canvases as deletrious presences that question man, who has created them, and who must now surrender before them.
In such a sense Susana y el viejo is an exception within the Surrealist creations by Berni. Here he awakens the erotic vein that will manifest itself once again--after a long absence--in the 1960's and 1970's Ramona Montiel series. In his own fashion the painter secularizes one of the most disseminated stories of the Book of Daniel (chapter XIII); that of the chaste Susana, desired by two elders who secretly spy on her in the garden and want her to yield to them.
This canvas, painted in Rosario in 1931, a city then celebrated for its bordello life and its active Italian mafia, the artist displays Susana's nakedness with an evident idle delight, as does Manet with his Olympia. This frontal nude, occupying the greater part of the composition, is only seen by the spectator. The presence of the elder is alomost non-existant: just his face is seen, truncated by the door from where he seems to emerge, at a height that dwarfs him. Such an explosion of the unexpected, so common in Berni's Surrealist works, is fulfilled when we, the spectators, are able to contemplate the abundant nudity of this woman, and observe that the elder does not look at Susana at all. Forty-five years later, in El sueo de Ramona (Ramona's Dream, 1977), a vast oil-collage on panel, Berni returned to the subject matter of Susana y el viejo. In the realism of this specific work we find the inspiration of a Surrealist imagination.
Jorge Glusberg
Director, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes
Buenos Aires, March 1998
Translated by Dr. Wayne H. Finke