Legacy 7-Burri

Sackcloth and Pumice Ashes

Feb 13, '12 5:55 AM for everyone

The latest show at the Estorick Gallery is something slightly unusual- if only because the artist it covers hasn’t had a major show in Britain for over fifty years.   Alberto Burri isn’t a name who rings many bells here, unlike contemporaries such as Luciano Fontana or slightly later figures associated with movements like Arte Povera.   He’s  better known in the US, no doubt because from the 1960’s onwards he regularly spent winters in California (worrying about getting television feeds of Italian football- he was a keen Perugia supporter) and married an American dancer and choreographer.

Burri’s life story is, to say the least, intriguing and may provide clues for explaining the relative neglect of his work.   He came from Citta di Castello in Umbria.   This sits in the upper Tiber valley among tobacco fields (most of Italy’s home-grown tobacco comes from the region- and the gallery which Burri eventually set up in the town is housed in a series of former tobacco drying sheds).  It’s not an area tourists venture into much (guidebooks are a bit sniffy)- which is rather unfair.  I’ve been there and it’s a very pleasant town with a fine historic core whose cathedral is home to some outstanding early medieval metalwork; its main sin seems to be that it isn’t a hill town and is a bit workaday round the edges.   From an artistic perspective, however, it was very much in the rural hinterlands.  

Then again young Burri (when not playing football) wasn’t initially interested in becoming an artist.  He planned to be a doctor.   This is where things get problematic.  He specifically wanted to be a doctor of tropical medicine to work in the East African colonies of Mussolini’s New Roman Empire.  Burri was a zealous Fascist.   In 1935 he volunteered under age to fight in the Italian conquest of Ethiopia (one can only guess how far he may have been involved in the atrocities of that episode, though the Blackshirt units such as the one he belonged to had a particularly unsavoury reputation for violence and indiscipline).   He got his doctorate just in time to be conscripted as a military doctor for the Italian army in North Africa during the Second World War and was captured by the British in Tunisia.  This clearly didn’t shake his faith in Mussolini; he was eventually sent off to a prison camp in the depths of Texas reserved for hard core, bitter end, true believers set up to segregate them from the mass of Italian PoWs.   It’s a sobering thought that this may have saved him from a good deal worse.   Burri had the stereotypical profile (down to the fascination with African Imperial mirages) of those who joined up with the thuggish bands in the service of Mussolini’s puppet Italian Social Republic (RSI) and waged a brutal, atrocity-strewn, civil war against the Partisan movement and- increasingly- the wider Italian populace.  It’s not hard to imagine an alternative career track which could have seen him facing a Partisan firing squad in the spring of 1945.

Burri discovered his artistic bent behind barbed wire in Texas- encouraged and coached by a minor second generation Futurist (Marinetti, given a state funeral by the RSI in 1944, would no doubt have approved).   On his release from America he never picked up the threads of his medical career.    Italy’s colonies were lost and one suspects that he simply wasn’t interested in working outside a colonial context.   He never had any formal artistic training but appears to have had little difficulty making his way in artistic circles- though it may be revealing that his earliest links were with a group headed by Enrico Prampolini, another man with strong Fascist connections in his pre-1940 career.   They later fell out- even leaving politics out of the equation, Burri appears to have been a difficult personality.

He was certainly a remarkably rapid developer who raced through styles in the late 1940’s.  He started out in a rather attractive Expressionist mode as demonstrated by the piece at the top of this article (presumably in the back streets of Citta di Castello) but quickly turned to various forms of Abstraction.    More important for his future reputation, he began experimenting with materials, putting sand or other ingredients into his paints.  From there he moved on to incorporating other materials in his work altogether, turning them into distinctly three dimensional pieces.   While some of these materials- sackcloth, tar- were more or less traditional (at least within the canon of 20^th century art), others- polythene wrapping, vinyl- were resolutely modernist.   By the 1950’s Burri was increasingly inclined to take a blow torch to his works in order to exploit the different qualities of the various materials under heat to achieve random aesthetic effects.   Most of the materials used were cheap and the results rough- which was entirely the point- see below.  

Latterly he went in for making massive monochrome quasi-sculptures (black or white- examples of both are in the show) by pouring huge amounts of paint into rectangular forms and letting them dry out, creating complex and random patterns of cracking (an example is at the bottom)

Obviously one can see influences from what was going on elsewhere in the artistic world- particularly America. There appear to be clear echoes of Jackson Pollock’s style of Abstract Expressionism - “appear” because the chronology doesn’t quite fit and it would seem that Burri’s development was largely independent of external influences though the echoes may have left him looking a bit too “American” to be fully appreciated in Europe.   The use of strange, “modernist” materials to create strange, slightly alienating, effects could be placed in the Futurist tradition, though at a remove or two.  Perhaps not having undergone formal art school training encouraged an openness to the unfamiliar and unorthodox (though I wonder if Burri’s use of unconventional materials will eventually case conservation issues for his works).

I wasn’t sure I’d actually like Burri’s work and on some levels I’m still not sure I do.   At times one feels that working with unusual materials in novel and unconventional ways could become something of an end in itself- some of the works in the show have a faint air of more or less successful experiments.    The colour palate is quite narrow- garish red, black and brown predominating.  In all honesty I’m not sure I’ll be rushing to the tobacco sheds of Citta di Castello to see vast amounts of his work all hung together.   On the other hand his best work has a strange hypnotic power.   The eye starts seeing landscapes in the wrinkles and scorches and cracks (indeed it’s rather encouraged to do so for the large monochromes, which are called “Crete” in an explicit reference to the strange, slightly unearthly but totally man-made, ridge landscape south of Siena).   Light plays off the surface irregularities in intriguing ways.  Viewed from another angle, though, they’re scenes of desolation, like land buried in volcanic lava or dessicated by drought.   Unlike the actual Crete, nothing grows there.   Indeed there’s a kind of bleakness about most of Burri’s work.   Even in his early days there weren’t many people in his paintings- the only figurative work in the collection involves a torchlit procession of penitents at a religious festival in Citta di Castello, and they look predictably downbeat about life.    The non-figurative work has a sense of the impersonal about it, of creation as a random and non-human event.

Where does Burri’s Blackshirt background come in here?  I don’t honestly know.   I’m intrigued at how completely unaware of this dimension of the artist’s background the reviews in the UK broadsheet papers appeared to be.  The default assumption seems to be that all modernist art must inevitably be left wing in political sympathy and, to the extent that reviewers located any political content in Burri’s work it was put in those terms.  This conveniently forgets that Fascists could be as verbally anti-capitalist and lyrical about alienation in industrial society as any devotee of Leon Trotsky- a point, in fairness, which facilitated the post-1945 passage of a number of Fascist intellectuals into the welcoming arms of Togliatti’s Communists though in those cases the rhetoric was usually marinaded in a hefty dose of anti-Americanism which would have sat oddly with Burri’s later lifestyle.   More saliently also forgets that, at least in Italy, artistic modernism could have all manner of political alignments.   I suppose one could read the bleakness I feel in a lot of Burri’s work as a response to ongoing personal sorrow at not being able to lead the life he’d dreamed of and the bankruptcy of the political faith he embraced in his youth but that’s probably over-interpretation……