Alberto Burri

James Johnson Sweeney, Burri, Rome 1955
Cesare Brandi & Vittorio Rubiu, Burri Contributi al Catalogo Generale, Rome 1963, p. 198, no. 136, illustrated
Paolo Levi, in ''Architectural Digest'', Nuove Glorie e Vecchie Storie, Milan 1988, pp. 20-24, illustrated
Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini, Burri Contributi al Catalogo Sistematico, Città di Castello 1990, p. 46, no. 155, illustrated in colour

“Words are no help to me when I try to speak about my painting. It is an irreducible presence which refuses to be transferred into any other form of expression. It is a presence both imminent and active.” (Alberto Burri quoted in Exhibition Catalogue, New York, Museum of Modern Art, The New Decade, 1955)

Enamoured by all things new and international, the dawn of the post war period in Italy was met by a period of cultural and aesthetic liberation. With this fruitful climate, there emerged a group of artists spearheaded by Alberto Burri whose efforts to liberate matter from its enslavement to form revolutionised artistic endeavour in Europe and beyond.

Burri’s work offered a parallel vision of reality: one defined by the intrinsic qualities of the materials and the relationships between them. At a time when most artists were still preoccupied with Abstract expressionism and lyrical Abstraction to express the emotional flux of passing experience, Burri immersed his art in the real, employing found 'low-art' materials of everyday existence to achieve a more direct exchange between art and life.

Burri’s art is rooted in the conviction that feeling can be expressed yet not described: “The words don’t mean anything to me; they talk around the picture. What I have to express appears in the picture.” (Alberto Burri in Milton Gendel, ‘Burri Makes a Picture’, in: Art News, 1954) Using the pre-linguistic, non-formal vocabulary of material and gesture, Burri sought to translate the chaotic flux and indescribable energies of contemporary existence into the language of art.

Executed in the same year that his work was beginning to receive widespread public recognition, Sacchi is a superlative example of Burri’s most important and celebrated series. Informed by his medical expertise as a wartime doctor, and his subsequent internment as a prisoner of war in Texas, the present work is permeated with themes of survival, healing and recovery. Through the straining seams and gaping lacerations of the re-patched burlap composition, the physicality of manual labour and the harsh realities of war are poetically expressed in one of his most powerful mature works.

Intricately composed of sewn-together fragments of Hessian sacks that had been used to ship alimentary rations into a war-torn and hungry Europe, there is an evocative sense of history which transgresses culture and nature, naturally provoking comparison with an artist like Beuys’ use of felt. Saved for him by the miller in Città di Castello, the diverse textures and tones of Burri's Hessian sacks here are balanced in a symphony of form, line, colour and relief. Stitched, repaired and restored to a new life, the exquisitely constructed composition reflects Burri’s belief that, “The principle characteristic is the form.”

Built around dynamic relationships of the contrasting textures and colours, the meandering weave of the deep umber Hessian is invigorated by the erupting violence of scar-like holes and lacerations. Like a bomb moments before explosion, the composition is energised by an intense feeling of contained and suspended energy. The urgency of Burri's stitching and the improvised spontaneity of his re-patching heighten the surface tension as the burlap struggles to contain the inner vitality of the ‘erupting’ core beneath. Stretched like a skin or membrane enriched by pores of flashing of gold and crimson, Burri breathes life into the materials transforming the inanimate surface into a living, organic substance.

The investigation into the valency and independence of material in art had developed rapidly during the first half of the Twentieth century, so much so that by the end of the war, matter was no longer seen just as a static, decorative element but as a dynamic and organic entity. Although extra pictorial elements like newspaper cuttings, small objects and fragments of wood had broken with classical pictorial conventions when they first surfaced in the work of the Futurists and Cubists, it was Burri's Sacchi that first transformed the surface materiality of the composition into the true loci of the work.

Operating on the threshold of art and reality, Burri's Sacchi enlivened the utilitarianism of Cubist collage techniques to forge a new chapter in painting. American curator James Johnson Sweeney spoke of the ‘wonder of reason’ in Burri’s art, and expanded upon this in a perceptive monograph on the artist’s Sacchi in 1955. “Burri transforms rags into a metaphor for bleeding human flesh, breathes fresh life into the inanimate materials which he employs, making them live and bleed; then heals the wounds with the same evocative ability and the same sensibility with which he first inflicted them. What for the Cubists would have been reduced to the partial distillation of a painted composition … in Burri’s hands becomes a living organism: flesh and blood… The picture is human flesh, the artist a surgeon.” (James Johnson Sweeney in Exhibition Catalogue, Rome, L’Obelisco, Burri, 1955)

Although Burri’s Sacchi represented a radical new direction in the Italian Post War art scene, in their construction they, “revealed his latent classicism, his instinctive faith in the ancient and continually renewed Italian sense of scale, what one might call divine proportion.” (Exhibition Catalogue, Royal Academy of Arts, Italian Art in the 20^th Century, p. 203) This is keenly felt in the monochrome painted rectangles on the right hand side which give the composition a feeling of order. Enveloping the Hessian beneath like a medical bandage or dressing, these cracked and condensed monochrome surfaces recall Burri’s Bianco paintings of and partake in similar existentialist values that enriched the contemporary American paintings of Reinhardt, Rothko and Newman.

Like raw geological samples extracted straight from the earth, the organic aesthetic and principles of Burri’s Sacchi established the early foundations of Land Art and Arte Povera. Actively inspiring a whole generation of artists in their creative endeavours through his alchemical facility with materials, as Aldo Mondino recalled, “I remember seeing a Burri show at La Bussola… it was those Burlap sacks that sent my life in a different direction, and I have heard other artists of my generation say the same thing.” (Aldo Mondino, interview by A. Galleta in ‘Mondino’ leaflet produced for the Venice biennale of 1984)

On a trip to Paris in 1948, Burri had encountered the work of Jean Dubuffet and Jean Fautrier, and undoubtedly related to and been inspired by the primitive rawness of their work. However, in contrast to his French contemporaries who were upholding the traditional distinction between figure and ground by inscribing figures into the surfaces of their heavily textured compositions, Burri’s abandoned pictorial mimesis altogether. This negation of the figure-ground relationship exerted a lasting influence Robert Rauschenberg who visited Burri’s studio in February 1953 during the time of his exhibition at the Galeria dell’Obelisco. Although collage elements had appeared in Rauschenberg’s oeuvre before their meeting, on returning to New York, Rauschenberg’s factual appropriation of material flourished as he embarked on his most celebrated series, the Combines.

Burri’s replacement of Romantic inspiration with reality through the mediated re-appropriation of materials was equally significant. This not only influenced the Neo-Dadaist assemblages of Arman and Spoerri, but eventually formed the basis of much Installation Art. Burri’s use of the printed word in his Sacchi also presaged the mediated signs of Jasper Johns and the Pop generation. Although Burri's intentions were without question different to Johns', Burri’s propagation of the printed word opened the floodgates to the semiological integration of the urban and media context in art.

Sacchi stimulates mental and physical engagement with the viewer. The precise structure of its composition and the tension of the constructive-destructive gesture exploit the expressive possibilities of the raw, worn jute. Reaching a perfect equilibrium between the sensuality of the texture, the balance of the composition and the vitality of the materials, the present work epitomises Burri’s revolutionary approach to material and his transformation of the concept of painting.