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Lot Essay
Alberto Savinio painted Croix marine in 1929 in Paris during the height of his involvement with the Surrealist movement. Like his brother Giorgio de Chirico, Savinio’s relationship with the Parisian Surrealists was complex. Having returned to Paris in 1926 and taken up painting, he was not estranged from André Breton and the Surrealist group in the way that his brother had become by this time, but neither was he a close follower of the group or their ways.
Savinio had close contacts throughout this period with ‘non-observant’ Surrealists such as Roger Vitrac and Jean Cocteau and he also met frequently with Ernst, Eluard, and Aragon as well as, more occasionally, Breton. Between 1928 and 1929 Savinio also worked closely alongside Ernst and Picabia on the decoration of Léonce Rosenberg’s apartment. While Breton championed Savinio, like his brother, as one of the key ‘initiators’ of Surrealist painting, Savinio, himself, in his later writings sought to distinguish between the Surrealists’ search for the ‘informal’ and the ‘unconscious’ and what he described as his own attempt to ‘give form to the shapeless and conscience to the unconscious’. (A. Savinio, ‘Preface to Tutta la vita’, Milan, 1945, quoted in Alberto Savinio Paintings and Drawings 1925-52, exh. cat. London, 1992, p. 23)
Croix marine is a major work from the late-1920s period, in which Savinio pictorially presented his own take on the then common Surrealist practice of fusing the human form with inanimate objects. Instigated, perhaps by de Chirico’s mannequins which had subsequently been imitated by Surrealist painters like Ernst and Magritte, Savinio’s own unique mix of the human and the inanimate took on a more lyrical form. As Croix marine illustrates, Savinio preferred to integrate the predominantly classical human form with colourful toy-like objects and shapes that call to mind the joy and wonder of childhood. The strange combination of these colour-filled forms and mournful-looking human figures in Savinio’s paintings of the late-1920s was often accompanied by themes drawn from the bible and classical antiquity. As children, Savinio and de Chirico had been so close that they called themselves Castor and Pollux, after the famous twins of classical antiquity, and in their art of the 1920s, both artists explored the idea of what Jean Cocteau was to describe as a laic mystery. This was the idea of seeing modern day life as a kind of mystical Odyssey - a wandering between different times and realities - and it was often expressed in the de Chirico brothers’ art through painterly invocations of Argonauts and other marine adventures.
Croix marine belongs to a series of paintings invoking Argonauts, seafaring Titans and other classical figures such as Ulysses, that Savinio repeatedly made in the 1920s. In this work, a ship and its wandering heroes appears to have run aground and become crystallized into a monument at the moment that they reached the shore. With is strange Baron Munchhausen-like mixture of classical allegory, child-like colour and puzzling imagery, Savinio’s eclectic vision looks strikingly contemporary. Like many of his paintings, it carries a post-modernist sense of colour, playful invention and anti-rationality - qualities more akin to the works of Picabia than those of his brother in fact. The enduring, post-modernist feel of Savinio’s art may also derive from the fact that it was his work, more than that of any other Italian painter that informed and directed much of the aesthetic of several Italian Transavanguardia painters in the 1980s, in particular the paintings of Sandro Chia.
Savinio had close contacts throughout this period with ‘non-observant’ Surrealists such as Roger Vitrac and Jean Cocteau and he also met frequently with Ernst, Eluard, and Aragon as well as, more occasionally, Breton. Between 1928 and 1929 Savinio also worked closely alongside Ernst and Picabia on the decoration of Léonce Rosenberg’s apartment. While Breton championed Savinio, like his brother, as one of the key ‘initiators’ of Surrealist painting, Savinio, himself, in his later writings sought to distinguish between the Surrealists’ search for the ‘informal’ and the ‘unconscious’ and what he described as his own attempt to ‘give form to the shapeless and conscience to the unconscious’. (A. Savinio, ‘Preface to Tutta la vita’, Milan, 1945, quoted in Alberto Savinio Paintings and Drawings 1925-52, exh. cat. London, 1992, p. 23)
Croix marine is a major work from the late-1920s period, in which Savinio pictorially presented his own take on the then common Surrealist practice of fusing the human form with inanimate objects. Instigated, perhaps by de Chirico’s mannequins which had subsequently been imitated by Surrealist painters like Ernst and Magritte, Savinio’s own unique mix of the human and the inanimate took on a more lyrical form. As Croix marine illustrates, Savinio preferred to integrate the predominantly classical human form with colourful toy-like objects and shapes that call to mind the joy and wonder of childhood. The strange combination of these colour-filled forms and mournful-looking human figures in Savinio’s paintings of the late-1920s was often accompanied by themes drawn from the bible and classical antiquity. As children, Savinio and de Chirico had been so close that they called themselves Castor and Pollux, after the famous twins of classical antiquity, and in their art of the 1920s, both artists explored the idea of what Jean Cocteau was to describe as a laic mystery. This was the idea of seeing modern day life as a kind of mystical Odyssey - a wandering between different times and realities - and it was often expressed in the de Chirico brothers’ art through painterly invocations of Argonauts and other marine adventures.
Croix marine belongs to a series of paintings invoking Argonauts, seafaring Titans and other classical figures such as Ulysses, that Savinio repeatedly made in the 1920s. In this work, a ship and its wandering heroes appears to have run aground and become crystallized into a monument at the moment that they reached the shore. With is strange Baron Munchhausen-like mixture of classical allegory, child-like colour and puzzling imagery, Savinio’s eclectic vision looks strikingly contemporary. Like many of his paintings, it carries a post-modernist sense of colour, playful invention and anti-rationality - qualities more akin to the works of Picabia than those of his brother in fact. The enduring, post-modernist feel of Savinio’s art may also derive from the fact that it was his work, more than that of any other Italian painter that informed and directed much of the aesthetic of several Italian Transavanguardia painters in the 1980s, in particular the paintings of Sandro Chia.