Toni del Renzio, "Enfant terrible of English Surrealism" (The Independent)
Parry
http://news.independent.co.uk/people/obituaries/article2145119.ece
Toni del Renzio
Enfant terrible of English Surrealism
Published: 12 January 2007
Antonino Romanov del Renzio dei Rossi di Castellone e Venosa (Toni del
Renzio), painter, art historian and writer: born Tsarskoe Selo, Russia
15 April 1915; married 1943 Ithell Colquhoun (died 1988; marriage
dissolved 1947), 1970 Doris Miller (two sons, two daughters); died
Margate, Kent 7 January 2007.
Toni del Renzio was the last of the pre-Second World War members of the
Surrealist group in England. He was also the enfant terrible of the
movement, clashing furiously with its intellectual leader E.L.T. Mesens.
The ancestry of Antonino Romanov del Renzio dei Rossi di Castellone e
Venosa goes back to the Russian Tsars. Born in 1915 in Tsarskoe Selo, he
was barely two when the 1917 Russian Revolution forced his aristocratic
family to flee for their lives, first to Yalta and then to Italy. After
a schooling split between Switzerland and Britain, he went to
universities in the United States and Italy and graduated in philosophy
and mathematics.
As a student he had mingled in artistic circles - the latter-day
Futurists, the Milan Abstractionists, the Movement for Rational
Architecture. But creativity came to an abrupt end in 1935 when Toni del
Renzio, as he had chosen to call himself, was conscripted into
Mussolini's Tripolitan cavalry and packed off to fight in Abyssinia. To
his horror, he discovered that the Abyssinians castrated their prisoners
and he decided to abscond.
Disguised as a Bedouin Arab, he joined a camel caravan and fled across
the North African desert. From Morocco he reached Spain, just as the
civil war was breaking out. He took up arms against Franco and fought
first in the Barcelona streets and then on the Aragon front. War-weary,
he set off again and reached Paris in 1937.
There he worked as a designer and painter, mainly for theatres and
ballet companies, and became immersed in a vibrant European avant-garde,
frequenting Picasso and the Surrealists. He began painting in earnest,
producing delicately coloured theatrical illusions inspired by the stage
and dance. But, as Hitler was drawing closer to the French frontier in
1939, del Renzio took flight across the Channel.
During the Second World War, he was enlisted in "reserved" work
connected with the Allies, including General Charles de Gaulle's Free
French fighters, for whom del Renzio designed and co- ordinated a
travelling exhibition. As everywhere else in Europe, the Surrealist
movement in Britain was in tatters and, by 1941, it had come to a
complete standstill. Roland Penrose, its chief founder, had become a
captain in the Home Guard and camouflage designer of dubious merit, S.W.
Hayter, Gordon Onslow-Ford and Sam Haile had all left for the United
States, F.E. McWilliam had joined the Royal Air Force and E.L.T. Mesens
had closed the London Gallery, the nerve centre for Surrealism in
Britain, stopped publishing London Bulletin, the British Surrealist
mouthpiece, and gone to work for the BBC broadcasting Allied propaganda.
Del Renzio decided to take the bull by the horns and revive the ailing
movement. "War or no war, there was nothing being done about Surrealism.
Hitler had to be defeated, yes, but Surrealism also had to carry on." In
March 1942 he published a single-issue magazine entitled Arson, "to
provoke authentic collective Surrealist activity", and within months he
organised an important Surrealist exhibition at the International Arts
Centre in Bayswater.
Seen as the movement's driving force, del Renzio was approached by the
editors of New Road, John Bayliss and Alex Comfort, to compile a
Surrealist anthology in 1943. Once it was published, a further offer
came from Cyril Connolly's Horizon, for which del Renzio was to have
edited a whole number. But all this was too much for Mesens, who was
enraged that his leadership had been usurped. Unable to contain his
anger, he scuppered the Horizon project and viciously attacked del
Renzio in the press.
By 1944, all the Surrealists, other than Ithell Colquhoun, to whom del
Renzio was by then married, had abandoned him. They even sabotaged a
recitation of his poetry at the International Arts Centre by showering
the stage with rotten eggs. Despite the hate conspiracy, no one could
deny that, without del Renzio, Surrealism would not have existed during
the war.
Del Renzio resumed freelance design activities, as well taking up a
teaching post at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts. He designed the
magazine Polemic and books for Pilot Press. He also did advertisement
mock-ups which appeared in Graphis, Penrose Annual and Design in
Britain. In 1948 he was appointed art director of the National Trade
Press (NTP) . He also became involved with the English Constructivist
scene.
The 1951 Festival of Britain approached him and drew on his "graphic"
talents and he was asked to design a series of panels on the evolution
of domestic kitchen machinery, a boom area at the time. But del Renzio
yearned for more involvement in the finer arts and resigned from the NTP
to go to Italy to study the latest trends of the Modern movement in
architecture. On his return he joined the Institute of Contemporary
Arts, then in Dover Street, as director's assistant.
He was in the perfect milieu for an artist: in 1952, together with the
artists Richard Hamilton, Nigel Henderson, John McHale, Eduardo Paolozzi
and William Turnbull, and the architects and critics Reyner Banham and
Lawrence Alloway, he founded the experimental Independent Group, an "art
of discussion, design and display". Its celebrated achievement was the
exhibition "This is Tomorrow", which was opened in 1956 at the
Whitechapel Gallery by a 12ft-tall Hollywood celebrity, Robbie the
Robot, who was then starring in MGM's Forbidden Planet. "This is
Tomorrow" emerged as a turning point of British art, with its fusion of
popular culture and orthodox abstract art, "high" and "low" art,
ideology and technology.
Then, an approach from Newnes and Pearson's women's magazine group
whisked del Renzio into the world of fashion publishing. In 1957 he was
special correspondent to The Times in France and Italy, but in 1958
joined Harper's Bazaar as art director, acting too as design consultant
to Encounter and French, German and Italian magazines, as well as
contributing to Lilliput and Flair. In 1961 he was appointed designer at
Topic, but within weeks was transferred to Paris as its correspondent.
>From there he also contributed to Apollo and undertook research at an
experimental French television centre, working on aesthetics and the
theory of games. A new challenge, transforming the magazine Novità into
Vogue Italiana, took him to Milan, where he also worked as a journalist
for Time-Life, writing essays on Italian art, architecture, design and
film, as well as carrying out extensive research for books on Leonardo
and Marcel Duchamp.
By 1965 he worked increasingly in film and television. Besides designing
titles and credits and making advertisements, he wrote scripts and
dialogue, directed films and documentaries and even acted, notably in
spaghetti westerns.
In 1967 and 1968 del Renzio visited California to lecture on art and
media at Berkeley and Santa Cruz. There he witnessed the San Francisco
hippie explosion at first hand, recounting his experiences in his 1969
book The Flower Children. Back in the UK, he continued to lecture at art
colleges, including the Chelsea School of Art, the Courtauld Institute
and Bath Academy of Art at Corsham, where he met his Estonian wife-to-be
Doris Miller. From 1975 to 1980, he was head of the Art History
department at Canterbury College of Art. In 1981, he took the post of
Director of the British Studies Centre of the Institute for American
Universities, his final administrative role. From then on, as well as
fathering quads at the age of 70, he concentrated on his painting and
collage, becoming increasingly innovative as the years passed.
At the same time, he restarted to publish Surrealist manifestos and
polemical texts, the last of which, Alter Ego and Doppelgänger, was
coming hot off the presses as he lay on his deathbed.
Silvano Levy
--------------------
Hyfler/Rosner
"Parry" <pa...@keroOMITmail.com> wrote in message
news:45A700...@keroOMITmail.com...
> from The Independent
> http://news.independent.co.uk/people/obituaries/article2145119.ece
>
> Toni del Renzio
> Enfant terrible of English Surrealism
> Published: 12 January 2007
This is the 4th time tonight this has been posted. How
surreal.
Parry
Sorry. I relied on Google to determine if the obit had been posted so
didn't know Matcus had already put it up.
-- Parry
Hyfler/Rosner
"Parry" <pa...@keroOMITmail.com> wrote in message
>> >
>> > Enfant terrible of English Surrealism
>> > Published: 12 January 2007
>>
>> This is the 4th time tonight this has been posted. How
>> surreal.
>
> Sorry. I relied on Google to determine if the obit had
> been posted so
> didn't know Matcus had already put it up.
There's a lot of confusion about puns and jokes this week,
isn't there?
mar...@myrealbox.com
On Fri, 12 Jan 2007 09:48:10 -0500, "Hyfler/Rosner" <rel...@rcn.com> wrote:
>There's a lot of confusion about puns and jokes this week,
>isn't there?
:-)