A collector’s guide to Mario Schifano

Mario Schifano is sometimes referred to as Italy’s Andy Warhol, though this tends to narrow the focus onto his Pop art. The truth is it is difficult to define Schifano in terms of any one movement.

Schifano led a colourful life, and his social circle included Cy Twombly, the French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard and members of the Rolling Stones. (In the late 1960s, Marianne Faithfull left her then-boyfriend, Mick Jagger, for him.) He also had a weakness for drugs, which earned him six separate prison sentences.

In the decades since Schifano’s death in 1998, his work has been exhibited widely across Europe and the United States. He is currently the subject of a retrospective at the Palazzo Esposizioni Roma and was the inspiration for the 2024 show Layered Realities at the Axel Vervoordt gallery in Antwerp, previously having had works included in The World Goes Pop at Tate Modern in London.

Making his name: the Monocromi

Born in Libya — at the time an Italian colony — Schifano moved to Rome with his family at a young age. He was self-taught as an artist, his first job being as a ceramics restorer.

His early paintings owed a debt to Art Informel, though by 1960 he had moved on to the works with which he made his name: a series known as Monocromi (‘Monochromes’), each canvas consisting of an energetic field of a single colour.

The leading art dealer Ileana Sonnabend — a champion of the European and American avant-garde from the early 1960s onwards, first in Paris and later in New York — was such a fan of the Monochromes that she held two exhibitions of them at her Paris gallery in quick succession. When Schifano announced in 1963 that he would paint no more of these works, she was furious, cutting off all ties with him.

Logos, advertisements and Italian Pop art

Schifano’s reputation grew swiftly. The writer Goffredo Parise described him as ‘a prince, a true Ahmed from One Thousand and One Nights... an extremely handsome, immediately brilliant genius... who painted with fulminant speed’.

Benefiting from Marshall Plan economic aid, Rome in the early 1960s had become a fast-living city of conspicuous consumption. This was the age of la dolce vita. Schifano joined a group of artists known as the Piazza del Popolo school, who responded to the changing streets around them — above all, to the abundance of advertising posters.

He painted two sets of canvases in which the corporate logos of Coca-Cola and Esso were adapted and reworked. These have become arguably the most famous works of all Italian Pop art.

He tended to isolate sections of each logo rather than depict it in full; he also used loose painterly swirls rather than seeking to copy the slick mechanical execution of the original signs. In doing this, he was, in a sense, deconstructing and undercutting the commercialisation of Italian culture.

Schifano’s choice of titles for these works — many of which included the word ‘propaganda’ — certainly supports such a view.

The artist as rock star, from Rome to New York

Schifano brought a rock’n’roll spirit to the art world — and not just because he created and briefly managed his own group, The Stars of Mario Schifano. He drove around Rome in a Rolls-Royce and had countless girlfriends, the best-known of whom was the model and actress Anita Pallenberg, later the lover of both Brian Jones and Keith Richards from the Rolling Stones.

The artist’s connection to the English rockers went further than that, however: Richards and Mick Jagger gave cameo performances in a film he directed, Umano non umano (1968); and he was the inspiration for a Rolling Stones song, Monkey Man, on the album Let It Bleed.

Schifano was also infamous for the parties he threw at his lavish Roman apartment. One exasperated neighbour, the professor Mario Praz, described him as ‘a complete savage’ who had ‘shady people come and go’, creating ‘constant noise’ and ‘riding around the apartment on bicycles’.

In the mid-1960s, Praz found peace when Schifano moved for the best part of a year to New York. He shared a flat there with the poet Frank O’Hara and hung out with the likes of Warhol and Jasper Johns.

Schifano was one of very few Europeans to show alongside Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and others in New Realists, a landmark Pop art exhibition at Sidney Janis Gallery in Manhattan in 1962. Leonardo, a uniquely Italian iteration of Pop art, was made the year after.

Avant-garde landscapes and the rise of Arte Povera

As had earlier been the case with his Monochromes, Schifano soon chose to move on from his Pop work, too — this time to become a landscape painter.

Not that his paintings in this genre could ever be mistaken for a Constable or a Corot. He approached them in an avant-garde fashion, using many unorthodox materials, such as parcel paper (which he stuck to his canvases) and enamel paint (which he applied to that paper, even though it is typically used for industrial purposes).

Schifano was fond, too, of covering certain works in a sheet of Perspex. With his adoption of everyday and industrial materials, he anticipated the rise of the Arte Povera movement.

He often left large sections of his landscapes unfinished, meaning that much of the parcel paper is visible. Was this his way of stressing that, no matter how convincing the work, landscape paintings are ultimately just representations of reality rather than reality itself?

Certainly, in his political outlook, he insisted that people shouldn’t take things at face value. In the late 1960s, Schifano become increasingly engaged in left-wing politics and donated large amounts of money to anti-government groups across Italy.

The market for Schifano

Schifano continued to work, intermittently, up until his death in 1998, aged 63. In the late 1980s, for instance, he was invited to design the leaders’ jerseys for the Tour de France.

It is fair to say that Schifano’s output in one decade — the 1960s — is richer than most artists manage in a whole career. He embraced elements of gestural abstraction, Pop art, Conceptualism, Arte Povera, landscape painting and geometric abstraction.

The top 10 prices for Schifano at auction have all been for works he made in the 1960s, with the current record standing at €2.3 million. In 2022, La stanza dei Disegni (1962) sold at Christie’s in Paris for €1,302,000, the second-highest price achieved at auction.

Schifano may have been somewhat forgotten in the latter part of his career and in the period after his death, but he remains a major figure. And with works by Italian post-war artists such as Lucio Fontana and Alberto Burri fetching millions at auction, the renewed interest in Schifano should come as no surprise.

Christie’s 20th/21st Century Art auctions take place at Christie’s in Paris and online, 8-17 April 2026, and will be on view 9-16 April. Explore the preview exhibition and sales

Related artists: Mario Schifano