Alberto Burri

Private Collection, Monaco (acquired directly from the artist in 1972)
Sale: Sotheby's, London, Contemporary Art, 9 December 1999, Lot 47
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini, Eds., Burri Contributi al Catalogo Sistematico, Città di Castello 1990, p. 193, no. 818, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the whites are slightly warmer in tone in the original. The catalogue illustration fails to fully convey the various layers and rippling effects of the plastic material. Condition: This work is in very good condition.
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NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

"Burri is a poet, a surgeon who knows and feels with intense visualization what lies in the fleshy surface of his compositions, and an artist who is able to suggest this to the sympathetic observer"  James Johnson Sweeney, Burri, Rome 1955, p. 6

Alberto Burri's dramatic Grande Bianco Plastica, 1965, is a monumental example from a series of works that the artist first began in 1960.  Having exploited the expressive possibilities of everyday and often impoverished materials such as burlap (sacchi), wood (legni) and iron (ferri), in this work Burri turns to plastic.  Beautifully revealing his unique approach to material, Grande Bianco Plastica exhibits Burri's ability to transform it into a medium capable of expressing his powerful artistic vision.  By burning clear plastic, Burri lets his material undergo something of an alchemical transformation.  Elegantly stretched and draped across the surface, and gathered in areas to recall an impasto effect or drapery in classical sculpture, the burned plastic creates a dynamic surface of new, multi-layered skins.  The transparent material is manipulated by the artist to the extent that the viewer is confronted with an 'immaterial material': one sees the vivacity and movement of its surface, but barely the material itself.  Burri is a master of manipulating matter into combustions of great beauty and poetry.

The compelling presence of matter is the focal point of this work.  Cesare Brandi wrote in 1963 of the first Plastiche works that they "represented the culmination of all Burri's previous experiments... in the direct line which leads from the Gobbi through the Combstione and the Ferri to the Plastiche, they constitute an astonishing novelty" (Cesare Brandi, Alberto Burri, New York 1963, p. 5).  As Gerald Norland reflects, Burri's decision to turn to plastic was quite radical: "On one level the use of industrial plastic sheets, so similar to the cellophane of contemporary packaging, would seem the most unlikely of artist's materials.  Plastic is so ubiquitous in later twentieth-century life that it is invisible to our awareness.  Burri has noticed that the materials' reflective potential offers visual possibilities of [a] unique material nature... How banal the material seems and how unlikely that it would inspire the artist to a new period in his development!" (Gerald Norland in: Exhibition Catalogue, Los Angeles, Frederick S. Wright Art Gallery, University of California, Alberto Burri: A Retrospective View 1948-1977, 1977, p. 56).  This work, one of Burri's most magnificent images of burned everyday matter, epitomizes the artist's mastery of the powerful potential of his creative process.

Fascinated by the idea of using fire as a creative medium, Burri collaborated with writer Giuseppe Cenza in the preparation of an article for the magazine Civiltà delle Machine.  In that early experiment, Burri burned paper and fabric, suspending the process when he felt he had obtained an expressive image and a surprising impact, adhering the remains to an appropriate sheet.  The results were published as an illustration in the November/ December 1955 issue of the magazine.  This led to Burri producing a number of burnings, using first wood and later other materials such as plastic, fastened to canvas and other supports.  There is an element in Burri's fire paintings that reaches backward to primordial feelings, and speaks to every person's experience of watching fires and knowing the danger and pain but also beauty in burning.  The combustione works can be read as an aggressive statement which communicates to all, mainly on the basis of simple materials and common experience. 

Grande Bianco Plastica underscores Burri's ability in handling this medium not only through its sheer size (this is one of the largest works of its kind), but also through the sensitive play of shapes and voids.  The viewer's eye scans the surface like a panoramic landscape, taking in the subtle differences between tones and textures.  This composition, as well as other combustion works, can be interpreted as images of life, as metaphors of the process of growth and decay, instilled with human pathos. 

Burri's combination of formal composition and random processes bridged the generation of Informel, which had developed in post-war Europe, and Arte Povera.  His work, alongside that of Lucio Fontana, was the most original and radical of the 1950s in Italy, and provided the inspiration for a style of pure abstraction, independent of gestural immediacy, developed by the artists belonging to the Art Informel movement.  Moreover, Burri was the only major Italian artist of this period to have had exhibitions in America early in his career, when the influential Stable Gallery in New York showed his work in 1955. 

Grande Bianco Plastica is from the esteemed collection of Stanley J. Seeger who began to acquire art as a student at Princeton in the early 1950s.  This was followed by a year in Florence as a pupil of the composer Luigi Dallapiccola, a period which had a tremendous impact on him, not just to his calling as a composer but to his appreciation of contemporary Italian culture.  Upon his return, it was the reproduction of recent Italian paintings in Time magazine that led him to seek out New York dealer Catherine Viviano's gallery, who represented outstanding young Italian artists of the period including Afro.  Over the next few years with Viviano's help he began to form the earliest stages of his collection and made several trips to Italy with her, meeting artists including Afro who introduced Seeger to Burri.  It was with this meeting that Seeger developed a life-long passion for the artist's work, whose pictures he continued to buy and who also remained a friend until his death in 1995.  These were the first works purchased by the young collector, who over time amassed a remarkable collection of Italian work of which fifty works were included in the landmark auction at Sotheby's Milan in 1998.  Encompassing not only a impressive body of earlier English and Italian work, Seeger's collection would grow to include masterpieces by Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Miró, Dubuffet, Tapiès and Jasper Johns, among other individual pieces by a range of 20^th Century European and American masters, reflecting the spirit of a true connoisseur.

Burri's impact on both European art history and the development of painting in America is immense.  It is interesting to note that in Paris Yves Klein made his first fire paintings with a flame-thrower only in 1961.  Today, Burri's influence can be felt in the combustion works of artists such as Cai Guo-Qiang.  As James Johnson Sweeny once commented, "Burri is a poet, a surgeon who knows and feels with intense visualization what lies in the fleshy surface of his compositions, and an artist who is able to suggest this to the sympathetic observer" (James Johnson Sweeney, Burri, Rome 1955, p. 6).