Salvatore Scarpitta

Private Collection, Milan

Galleria Spazio Mazzotta, Milan

Acquired directly from the above by the present owner 

New York, Leo Castelli, Scarpitta: Race Cars, 1969

Piacenza, Biffi Arte, Sal is Racer, 2012, n.p., illustrated in colour

Turin, Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Salvatore Scarpitta, 2012-13, p. 183, no. 48, illustrated in colour

B.H. Friedman, “The Ivory Garage”, Art News, Vol. 68, No. 2, April 1969, p. 53, illustrated

Luigi Sansone, Salvatore Scarpitta: Catalogue Raisonné, Milan 2005, p. 75, installation of the work in artist’s studio, p. 194, no. 351, illustrated, and p. 368, illustrated in colour

C. Lorenzi, Autoritratto, Milan 1969, p. 38, illustrated; Milan 2010, p. 28, illustrated 

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is deeper and richer in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Close inspection reveals some minor cracks with associated flaking, due to the ageing of the wood and a few scuffs and scratches in isolated places. There is a fine layer of dust adhering to the surface throughout. Further inspection reveals some brown spots towards the lower half of the work, which may be due to mould. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
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Executed in 1967-68, Racing Car 51 is the second of only three works that exist in this format and represents a rare example from Salvatore Scarpitta’s pivotal racing car series. Synonymous with signs placed on the side of race tracks or advertising American garages, the simplistic, almost comic strip nature of Racing Car 51 injects a measure of ironic and subtle criticism into the mass media Pop iconography of the time.  

The artist’s passion for cars began at an early age in Los Angeles in the 1930s when he started attending the Legion Ascot Speedway circuit in Boyle Heights. As he explained later, “I admired the racing drivers and the races at the time. The first time I painted it was the numbers that driver friends let me put on their shiny multi-coloured vehicles…” (Salvatore Scarpitta quoted in: Luigi Sansone Ed., Salvatore Scarpitta: Catalogue Raisonné, Milan 2005, p. 55). It was these constant trips to Legion Ascot Speedway and his interaction with the drivers and mechanics that were of fundamental importance to the life and art of Scarpitta and inspired his earliest works of drawings and sketches of cars, portraits of the drivers and race tracks. However, it was not until his return to America that he began to insert materials from the world of racing into his art “I started using certain things tied to the canvases, like seatbelts, buckles for harnesses… straps from racing cars, exhaust pipes and I grafted these things on to my canvas, as if to take myself back to a world that was more reassuring…”(Salvatore Scarpitta quoted in: ibid., p. 72). In 1964 Scarpitta went as far as creating a series of facsimile racing cars, beginning with Rajo Jack; an identical replica of a racing car that he had seen as a boy in California. With each car he strived to replicate every detail of the original, in some instances even the working mechanisms. Twenty years later he finally realised his lifelong dream of fabricating a working racing car named Sal Scarpitta Special, which he later raced in Maryland and Pennsylvania, sponsored by Leo Castelli.  A unique conflation of sculpture and painting Racing Car 51 epitomises the artist’s life-long passion. With engrossing vibrancy it articulates pivotal facets of his life from the avant-garde cultural scene of post-war Rome to the grubby speedways of rural Pennsylvania and Maryland and retains autonomy from the reductive abstraction that defines the rest of the artist’s oeuvre.

A seminal figure in post-war art, Salvatore Scarpitta has made his mark with a pioneering oeuvre that ranges from non-objective abstraction to avant-garde realism. Rising to prominence in 1957 after two breakthrough solo exhibitions at the Galleria del Naviglio in Milan and at the Galleria La Taratuga in Rome, Scarpitta met gallerist Leo Castelli in 1958; a meeting that proved invaluable for the artist’s career, prompting his first solo show in New York the following year. It was through Castelli that Scarpitta quickly went on to become one of the key players on the American art scene, exhibiting his works alongside the likes of Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist and John Chamberlain.