Emilio Vedova; Guardian obit (Italian artist)
Hyfler/Rosner
Revolutionary Italian artist whose abstract expressionism
fused politics with wild, sensuous painting
Christopher Masters
Tuesday November 28, 2006
Guardian
The Italian painter Emilio Vedova, who has died aged 87, was
a veteran of one of the 20th century's most bitter artistic
conflicts - the "battle of styles" in the 1950s between the
neo-realists and the pioneers of expressive abstraction.
Like many fierce quarrels, this dispute was conducted
between former friends, in this case the leftwing
intellectuals who had taken part in the Italian resistance
during the second world war. Some of them believed that
socialist painters should follow the example of Picasso's
Guernica and create overtly political, figurative images,
preferably on a grand scale; others, including Vedova,
argued that revolutionary art had, by its very nature, to be
abstract.
This conviction led him, in the 1950s, to fill his pictures
with wild patterns of smeared, poured and dripped paint. He
became a radical in both politics and technique, truly a
Jackson Pollock of the barricades.
The third of seven children, Vedova was born into a Venetian
artisan family: his father was a house painter and
decorator. By the age of 11, Emilio was forced to earn his
living, initially in a factory and then in the studios of a
photographer and restorer. Although he briefly took evening
art classes at the Scuola dei Carmini in Venice, he was
mainly self-taught, cutting his teeth with sketches of local
buildings and Renaissance paintings.
In 1937 Vedova made two pictures, The Raising of Lazarus and
Crucifixion from Behind, whose bold light effects and
unusual viewpoints were undoubtedly inspired by the
16th-century artist Tintoretto. But his most extraordinary
work that year, a representation of his own naked body
reflected in a mirror on the floor, also showed more
contemporary influences, especially from Maurice de Vlaminck
and Georges Rouault. Densely painted on coarse, unprimed
canvas, it is one of the rawest, most visceral
self-portraits of the 20th century.
During the second world war, Vedova lived mostly away from
Venice. He was involved in 1943 with Corrente, a Milanese
group whose manifesto proclaimed "the revolutionary function
of painting ... With our painting we are going to hoist
flags." Soon afterwards he joined the resistance in Rome,
recording his experiences in the partisan drawings that were
later exhibited across Italy.
At the end of the war Vedova returned to Venice, where his
work became progressively more abstract, combining sombre
tones with flat, angular planes partly influenced by cubism
and futurism. These black geometries eloquently express the
anxiety and anguish of the period. The World on its Tiptoes
(1946) and The Struggle (1949) were followed in 1950 by
Concentration Camp, a pattern of spiky shapes with a pool of
red at its core.
Such imagery clearly followed the principles of the
manifesto Beyond Guernica, co-signed by Vedova in 1946,
which urged artists to engage with reality without being
naturalistic. For a short while the division between
figurative and abstract painters was concealed by the Fronte
Nuovo delle Arti, which Vedova helped to found in 1947.
However, by 1952 he had joined the more avant-garde Gruppo
degli Otto, led by the critic Lionello Venturi. The uneasy
alliance had collapsed.
By this time Vedova had also developed contacts abroad,
especially in New York, where he exhibited for the first
time in 1951. His style was now close to the free
abstraction of French art informel and American action
painting, but, unlike many of his foreign contemporaries,
Vedova saw the spirit of revolution in even the most
sensuous, luscious brushstrokes. And if the spectators did
not share his vision, they could at least read the titles -
Protest Cycle, Universal Manifesto, Korea.
References to contemporary events became even more urgent
when Vedova was made an official artist-in-residence in
Berlin just two years after the construction of the wall in
1961. Working in a studio formerly occupied by the Nazi
sculptor Arno Breker, he created the Absurd Berlin Diary 64,
a colossal assemblage of jagged wooden pieces, aggressively
painted in clashing colours, which conveyed the trauma of
the divided city. Hung from the ceiling or arranged untidily
across the gallery floor, often linked by hinges like
parodies of medieval polyptychs, the panels also illustrated
the artist's desire to liberate art from its conventional
setting in a frame on a wall. This preoccupation, which
inspired the equally audacious Arte Povera movement, had
first appeared in 1959, when Vedova placed large abstract
canvases across the corners and ceiling of a room in the
Palazzo Grassi in Venice. Its most extraordinary expression
was achieved through the use of light in a number of
exhibitions and theatrical stagings, beginning in 1961 with
a production of Luigi Nono's socialist opera, Intolleranza
60.
Most remarkable of all was the installation
Space/Plurimo/Light, which Vedova created for the 1967
Montreal Expo. Here he used fragments of Murano glass to
project moving sheets of colour, accompanied by experimental
music, across a vast space, overwhelming the visitor with
light and sound.
In Vedova's sculpture the boundaries between the image and
its surroundings were often broken down by the presence of
dramatic voids. In the Laceration Cycles (1977-78),
graffiti-covered sheets were pierced with holes and slits,
while in Studies for a Space, a decade later, a tight knot
of twisted tubes and wires erupted from otherwise hollow
cylinders.
At the same time Vedova began a series of circular panels
spattered with paint - modern tondi, suspended, slanted or
propped against each other, but never hung neatly on the
wall. These culminated in He Who Burns a Book Burns a Man
(1993), in which hinged wooden discs, covered with ashes and
fragments of words, suggested the pages of a charred, ripped
book. Made soon after the shelling of the library at
Sarajevo during the Bosnian wars, they evoked the
intolerance and destruction that had characterised much of
the artist's lifetime.
Vedova's strong political motivation could not protect him
forever from the embrace of the establishment, and in 1996
he was awarded the grandiloquent title of Cavaliere di Gran
Croce della Repubblica Italiana; he even designed a tapestry
for the library of the Italian senate in Rome. But he
remained to the end a leftwing icon, the bearded,
bespectacled hero of radical Italian art. His wife
Annabianca predeceased him by a month.
· Emilio Vedova, artist, born August 9 1919; died October 25
2006