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Sackcloth and Ashes
Three works by Alberto Burri, one of the godfathers of the Post-War era


By William Paton

Alberto Burri is still, over a decade after his death and more than half a century since he began his celebrated Sacchi, considered one of the godfathers of the Post-War era. From him sprung, directly or indirectly, the Arte Povera movement, Piero Manzoni, Yves Klein and the Combines of Rauschenberg.

He was an artist's artist, gaining wider recognition slowly but considered one of the great minds by colleagues throughout the world. It is strange, then, to find that he was self-taught as an artist and was instead trained as a doctor. It was while he was being held as a prisoner-of-war in Texas during the Second World War that he refused to practice medicine-he was a military doctor-and turned instead to art.

His early works, few of which survive, were painterly landscapes that became increasingly gestural and abstracted. Their collage-like appearance gradually came to the fore, culminating in the Sacchi, stitched canvas works. Among these, his 1953 Sacco has an intense materiality; the contrasts between the various materials, textures, textiles and surfaces create a rich and absorbing interplay that engages our attention.

At the same time, the elements within the work are deliberately povera. The sacking itself, with its stenciled arrows, recalls the aid packages that were still a feature of daily life for so many Italians in the wake of the Second World War. Indeed, Burri's first ever Sacco featured canvas stamped with the Stars and Stripes, emphasising the paradoxical relationship between the United States and Italy-vanquisher and supporter-during that period.

Sacco recalls the tattered appearance of the ravaged post-War Italy, yet at the same time is a sensual celebration of life and of objects in their own right. It is not a picture, a representation, but is instead a textured and intricate quilt-work of little shards of the real world-as Burri himself stated, 'Everything is already present in the painting' (Burri, quoted in G. Serafini, Burri: The Measure and the Phenomenon, Milan, 1999, p. 114).

For decades, Burri created works that were steeped in their own objecthood. He forsook canvas, replacing it with plastic, clay, iron and sackcloth. Likewise, he forsook brushwork in favour of stitching and sewing, soldering and even burning. These transformative processes allowed Burri to celebrate the nature of each of the materials that he used as a medium while also capturing the artist's own movements, his gestures.

At the same time, many of these processes lend his works a sense of stopped time. The traces of the welding and beating of the metal in Grande Ferro and the scorched and twisted plastic of his Combustione, which even appears to have captured smoke within its very fabric, speak of a specific moment, a unique confluence of artist and material, a halted and preserved gesture from the real world-these are frozen, inimitable moments that have been harnessed before us.

As Emilio Villa declared of Burri's work in 1953, the year that Sacco was created: 'For each of these paintings, always a bit unexpected, we can always say: this is a work that could only have been done today, this is an action that could only have been performed today, not yesterday and not tomor row'(Vill a, quoted in ibid., p. 141).


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