Salvatore Scarpitta

Collection Mario Franchetti, Rome

Rome, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Linee della ricerca artistica in Italia 1960-1980, 1981, p. 60, no. 44, illustrated
Milan, Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Salvatore Scarpitta 1958-1985, 1985-86, p. 20, illustrated
Genazzano, Castello Colonna, La Collezione Franchetti a Roma, 1986, p. 13, illustrated
Rome, Studio Durante, Salvatore Scarpitta. Opere 1955-1964, 1991, no. 7, illustrated
Siena, Castelluccio di Pienza, Gli anni originali, 1995, illustrated

Cesare Vivaldi, Scarpitta, Rome 1958, illustrated
Exhibition Catalogue, Lyon, Musée Saint-Pierre, La couleur seule. L’expérience du monochrome, 1988, p. 93, no. 9, illustrated
Laura Tansini, 'Gli anni Sessanta a piazza del Popolo', in: Arte In, January/February 1998, p. 99, illustrated
Luigi Sansone, Salvatore Scarpitta, Milan 2005, p. 164, no. 207, illustrated

Though born in New York in 1919, Salvatore Scarpitta spent much of his childhood in and near the movie sets of California.  Yet, after feeling profound discontent at the superficiality and intellectutal inertia of Hollywood, he moved to Italy in 1936 to begin his training at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome. For the next ten years, Scarpitta would study under Mino Maccari and Amedeo Bocchi, meet Andrea and Pietro Cascella, travel to Bucharest, and join the American Navy; all the while learning and maturing as an artist.  In 1949, he held his first exhibit of expressionist portraits at Tanino Chiurazzi’s gallery in Rome. 

However, it was not until late 1957, that Salvatore Scarpitta created his first “wrapped” paintings by slashing apart canvases and salvaging the torn remains into bound works.  Layering and weaving strips of canvas, the artist created a rhythmic field of overlapping surfaces.  Instead of the traditional mode of mimicking space via painterly illusion, Scarpitta had literally transformed the flat surface of a painting into an animated, three-dimensional sculptural form. His works were thus invigorated by a vibrant and dynamic sense of ruin and renewal. In these works, Scarpitta explored and drove the canvas to its limit as a medium for artistic expression, and though an American by birth, this performance with, rather than on, the canvas, aligned him philosophically with his great Italian contemporaries: Alberto Burri, Lucio Fontana and Piero Manzoni.  After a groundbreaking show of these works at the Galleria La Tartaruga in April, 1958, Scarpitta moved to New York where he was quickly recruited by Leo Castelli.  There, shortly after Castelli’s first shows of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, Scarpitta’s first exhibit of Extramurals took place in January, 1959.

Executed in 1958, the present work is an exceedingly important canvas executed a year before Fontana would begin his eminent Slash paintings.  Of considerable size, Untitled presents the viewer an archetypal expression of Scarpitta’s tactile genius.  The simultaneous slashes and lacing imbues the composition with a tangible sense of agency, twisting and torquing, like a sentient being.  It records Scarpitta’s destruction with its violent tears and injured, gaping gashes, yet the tautly held fabric also appears to bandage the wounded canvas. Ultimately, we walk away from this work illumined by an intimate sense of Scarpitta’s revolutionary artistic vision, understanding of his statement that,  “The oil canvas had become for me so hostile that in order to find some peace with myself I had to tear it” (cited in Exh. Cat. Salvatore Scarpitta, Arona, ex Convento della Purificazione, 1998, p. 14).