Luminous, ethereal, and utterly bewitching, Enrico Donati’s Spaziale fiorito from 1948 is an incomparable masterwork by one of the most fascinating and inimitable artists of the twentieth century. A captivating visual investigation into all that is hidden, magical and inexplicable, Donati’s canvas offers us the experience of a dream, at once a wild product of automatism and yet carefully and seductively polished.

Once the last surviving member of the Surrealist movement, Donati’s early work of the 1940s bespeaks the influence of his abiding friendships with André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, and Yves Tanguy (see fig. 1).

Insatiably curious, Donati reinvented his painterly style innumerable times over his prolific six-decade career, vacillating between the alternating influences of Surrealism, Constructivism and Abstract Expressionism, yet always maintained a uniquely Surrealist sensibility. The best of Donati's paintings like Spaziale fiorito manifest the strange and the primeval as well as the cyclical regeneration of life/ They draw the viewer in with the suggestion of familiar forms like flora and fauna which simultaneously confound the mind.

Spaziale fiorito stands as the cornerstone of Donati’s entire oeuvre, building upon the Surrealist works that had come before and foreshadowing the later styles and multivalent modes he would indefatigably explore throughout his career. Befitting its importance, this work has been included in the artist’s most important retrospectives, including the 2006 exhibition at Weinstein Gallery that marked a critical reappraisal of his career, as well as the landmark 2007 de Young Museum show, The Surreal World of Enrico Donati—the cover of which featured Spaziale fiorito (see fig. 2).

One of only 35 canvases he produced during a period of intense creativity and experimentation in 1947-49, Spaziale fiorito is further distinguished by its unique and storied provenance, having been especially chosen by Donati as a gift for his mother–herself a gifted artist with a talent for copying Old Master paintings–before returning to the artist in 1979, with whom it remained for over two decades before entering the present collection.

In this uncanny and elaborate composition, effulgent entities emerge from the darkness, some blossoming with life, others appearing to melt or dissolve before our eyes. The complex pictorial space invites narrative interpretations yet simultaneously denies any sure meaning: near the bottom, skeletal fossil-like figures seem trapped in soil, while above them float diverse protoplasmic forms that resemble the flora and fauna of the sea. Upon closer inspection, however, these resolutely abstract shapes defy explanation. Placed within Donati’s metaphysically inspired canon, Spaziale fiorito is revealed as a glimpse into the unconscious stocked with kaleidoscopic forms that are wholly personal, unique and baffling.

As described by art historian Martica Sawin, “Perspectives shift and cancel one another; transparent planes turn inexplicably opaque; tantalizing illusions of objectness are swiftly nullified. Fragments of pattern and optical illusion alternately open or close off the suggestion of spatial depth; exquisite little details of color draw the eye like jewels. There is much that is suggestive and provocative, but the paintings remain singularly unyielding to the seeker of rational explanation” (Martica Sawin, “Spiritual and Electric Surrealism: The Art of Enrico Donati,” Arts, vol. 61, no. 8, May 1987, p. 28).

Evoking a primordial essence yet characterized with a distinctly modern sensibility, the present work evinces Donati’s enduring fascination with Native American and Canadian art forms, translated through his own prismatic perspective. In the early 1930s, Donati and his young family traveled through North America trading European objets d’art for artworks, talismans, and other objects from the tribes they encountered, many of which would fill Donati’s studio for years to come (see fig. 3). Although his idiosyncratic array of colors is far too personal to derive from any outside source, there is a marked similarity of spirit and intent to the Native work that inspired him: mystical, enigmatic, primal, and provocative, Spaziale fiorito bears an emotional kinship with the thaumaturgic objects Donati collected.

Executed at what is widely considered to be the conceptual peak of Donati’s career, Spaziale fiorito attests to an artist at his masterful maturity. Born in 1909 in Milan, Donati studied economics before turning his attention to avant-garde music and ultimately to painting, studying in Paris in the early 1930s. Following the outbreak of the Second World War, Donati—like many others—fled to the United States and settled in New York.

Recognition of his abilities by the renowned art historian Lionello Venturi led to a meeting with André Breton in 1942. Impressed by Donati’s paintings, Surrealism’s founder and pontifical grand master pronounced him a Surrealist on the spot and mustered him, as a younger peer, into the august company of such luminaries as Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst (see fig. 4), and Yves Tanguy. The presence of these titans was particularly influential to Donati at this time, when his own work was becoming increasingly interior and subjective. From 1947 to 1949 he withdrew within himself to experiment: his amorphous, organic forms slowly crystallized, becoming the color-drenched, enigmatic icons like the floral figures of the present work, then briefly solidifying into hard-edged geometric abstractions, before ultimately evolving into the richly textured and patterned pictorial riddles of his later years.

Donati also experimented with a series of Spaziale, or “spatial,” paintings, inspired by the work of Lucio Fontana, which aimed to synthesize color, sound, space, movement, and time into a new type of art. At the same time, such explorations of form and color recall the much earlier Dutch tradition of still life painting (see fig. 5), wherein lilting blossoms create rhythms of their own, not unlike the free floating figures in the present work. Bridging the gap between the Old and the Modern Masters, Donati’s inventive abstractions reveal a wealth of inspirations as well as the pioneering spirit of Surrealism.

Arguably the most dynamic and resolved work of the artist’s career, Spaziale fiorito embodies the myriad references and styles that Donati explored during this fertile artistic period, synthesizing the most potent elements into one archetypal masterwork.