Marino Marini

Hanover Gallery, London
Kathleen Walsh, London
The Lefevre Gallery (Alex Reid & Lefevre Ltd.), London (acquired from the above)
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1977

 

Abraham M. Hammacher, Marino Marini. Sculpture, Painting, Drawing, London, 1970, illustration of another cast pl. 224
Patrick Waldberg, Herbert Read & Gualtieri di San Lazzaro, Marino Marini, Complete Works, New York, 1970, no. 335, illustration of another cast p. 373
Carlo Pirovano, Marino Marini Scultore, Milan, 1972, no. 341, fig. 129, illustrations of another cast pp. 120 & 167
Marino Marini, Japan, 1978, no. 162, illustration of another cast
Marco Meneguzzo, Marino Marini - cavalli e cavalieri, Milan, 1997, no. 87
Fondazione Marino Marini (ed.), Marino Marini, Catalogue Raisonné of the Sculptures, Milan, 1998, no. 409, illustration of another cast p. 284

Dark brown-green patina, chiselled and cold-painted by the artist. This work is in very good condition. Some minor surface dirt consistent with age and one or two small losses to the patina consistent with handling.
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Equestrian images have a long and esteemed tradition in Western art. Throughout the centuries, paintings and sculptures of men on horseback, often depicting noble cavalrymen or generals mounted on their steed, celebrated the glories and victories of an era or an empire. But the sculptures of riders and horses that Marino Marini created after the Second World War are a radical departure from this tradition. Conceived in the midst of profound political transformation, Marini’s riders are a response to the wave of uncertainty that engulfed civilisation during the Cold War. Marini was obsessed with making the horse and rider theme applicable to the contemporary age, and no other artist in the history of 20th century art came close to revitalising this age-old subject with such creativity and expressive force. His anonymous, highly abstracted horsemen eschew any pomp or pretence and are rich with psychological complexity and formal beauty. This remarkable sculpture from 1955 of a rider and his horse, rigid with explosive tension, is a wonderful example of the artist's achievements in this area.

Marini’s interest in the horse and rider theme initially derived from the Etruscan and classical Roman sculptures that he had seen as a young art student in Italy. His first serious artistic consideration of the theme occurred during the early 1930s, after travelling to Northern Europe where he saw the 11th century equestrian statue of Emperor Henry II in Bamberg cathedral. Marini's admiration for these classical examples, as well as for Degas’s sculptures of racehorses, the Italian Futurists’ mechanised horses, and Picasso’s terrified horse in Guernica, inspired him to explore equestrian themes in his art. Over the next several decades, Marini's horsemen became increasingly abstract, and the bodies of the horse and rider were simplified to their most elemental components. By the 1950s, when the present work was created, Marini developed what is largely considered his most powerful representations of this figure. 

L'Idea del Cavaliere demonstrates the expressive shift of Marini’s art after the war. No longer satisfied with renderings of stoic figures on horseback, Marini, like many post-war Italian artists, invested his work with an emotional intensity that had not been present in his earlier sculpture. The shift was most pronounced in the Cavalieriseries, in which the riders now seemed to freeze with terror or brace themselves for the imminent bucking of their horse. ‘My equestrian figures are symbols of the anguish that I feel when I survey contemporary events,’ Marini wrote about the development of these sculptures. ‘Little by little, my horses become more restless, their riders less and less able to control them.  Man and beast are both overcome by a catastrophe much like those that struck Sodom and Pompeii’ (quoted in Sam Hunter, Marino Marini, The Sculpture, New York, 1993, p. 59).

In contrast to his earlier sculptures, which display a steadier, more balanced image of a horse and rider, the present work renders the figures in a more dramatic manner. Captured at a moment when both the rider’s and the horse’s body are moving upwards, this dynamic composition, dominated by vertical lines, reached its pinnacle in the monumental version of L’Idea del Cavaliere. The polychrome plaster is now in Collezione d’Arte Religiosa Moderna, Musei Vaticani in Rome, and was followed in 1956 by a unique painted wood version.  

The present sculpture was once in the collection of the English actress Kathleen ‘Kay’ Walsh (1911-2005). Walsh married David Lean in 1940, and appeared in two films – In Which we Serve and This Happy Breed – written by Noël Coward and directed by Lean.