Piero Manzoni

The New Smith Gallery, Brussels
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 1974 (through Paul Maenz, Cologne)

Eindhoven, Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Keuze uit de aanwinsten 1965-1969, 1969, p. 19, no. 41
Mönchengladbach, Städtisches Museum; Hannover, Kunstverein; Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, Piero Manzoni, 1969-70, no. 41 (Mönchengladbach), no. 37 (Hannover), no. 43 (Amsterdam)
Krefeld, Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, Sammlung Helga und Walther Lauffs - Amerikanische und europäische Kunst der sechziger und siebziger Jahre, 1983-84, p. 51, no. 231, illustrated 

 

Freddy Battino & Luca Palazzoli, Piero Manzoni Catalogue Raisonné, Milan 1991, p. 376, no. 735 B, illustrated
Germano Celant, Piero Manzoni Catalogo Generale, Tomo secondo, Milan 2004, p. 506, no. 737, illustrated

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the overall tonality is warmer and more cream colour in the original. The catalogue illustration fails to fully capture the texture and depth of the cotton. Condition: This work is in very good condition.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
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."

This is an outstanding example from Piero Manzoni's groundbreaking Achrome series, whose self-possession epitomises the artist's reaction against Abstract Expressionism. Here Manzoni has turned his attention to cotton wool, which in its bright, pristine condition retains a brilliance that matches the scruples of the artist. With its cloudlike quality and flat composure there is an overwhelming impression of methodical calm, freed from what Manzoni regarded as the contamination of personal concerns. Soft at the edges and compiled of irregularly divided panels (five across and six down), the flat picture plane invites the viewer to see it as an unquantifiable expanse. The adherence to repetitive titles throughout the series, as here, encourages compete immersion, moment by moment, in the series of imageless spaces. By refusing to give way to any individual features or allusions, the homogenous titles enforce Manzoni's insistence on the works being measurable only within their particular visual experience. 'Abstractions and references must be totally avoided. In our freedom of invention we must succeed in constructing a world that can be measured only in its own terms.' (Piero Manzoni, 'For the Discovery of a Zone of Images', c.1957, in Exhibition Catalogue, London, Tate Gallery, Piero Manzoni: Paintings, Reliefs and Objects, 1974, p.17).

This piece however is a notably mature materialization of the Achrome concept - a concept that Manzoni invented in 1957, in his search for a physical outlet for painting. The stress was on bringing primary materials to the fore, eliminating hue, line, form, or any signifying mark: early examples were made up of rough, scratched gesso, while others consisted of cut-up canvas in irregular rectangles or pleats. As the series grew, it embodied ideas expressed in Manzoni's renowned manifesto, published in the same year. For the young artist, it was essential that the canvas should remain an area of open experimentation. 'We absolutely cannot consider the picture as a space on to which to project out mental stenography. It is the area of freedom in which we search for the discovery of our first images' (Piero Manzoni, Ibid., p.17).

Softly unruffled, this piece shows Manzoni directing his energies towards the elimination of psychological and expressive intent. Advancing the subtleties of space that Mondrian achieved in paint, Manzoni used cotton wool to create a situation charged with tension from the fact that as an inert and colourless material, cotton wool has the potential for absorbency and to be reshaped.

The quest for 'freedom' from narrative content was an agenda shared by a number of Manzoni's contemporaries - in fact the Achrome was almost certainly stimulated by the work of Lucio Fontana and Alberto Burri (that spring Fontana included Manzoni in a group show at the Galleria Pater in Milan), and not least the Monochromes of Yves Klein (whose first show in Italy the year before had made a deep impression on Manzoni). However Manzoni's strategy was utterly distinctive. Rather than apply paint to the canvas's surface, he focussed on the material of the surface itself, allowing it to change in manifestation, apparently of its own accord. Throughout the series of Achromes, Manzoni took a detached, empirical stance, carrying out trials into how different materials could transform our understanding of what a painting is, or can be. This meant testing the physical constraints of a painting - the syntax of colour, canvas, and horizontal and vertical surfaces. At first, canvases would be covered with gesso or soaked in liquid kaolin, a soft china clay used in making porcelain. Seemingly white, in fact the kaolin achieved the effect of removing colour whilst adding weight, which could be used to make folds or sags in the canvas. Thus the artwork emerged, autonomously as it were, in the drying process. Born, it was untouched - unsullied - by interference from the artist. The Achromes were an attempt to resist any limitations other than their own existence, and in this piece, the purity of the cotton wool is the ultimate 'tabula rasa'.

Manzoni conducted out the Achrome experiments in a range of materials over several years, revealing a searching imagination: from the cotton wool in this piece to glass fibre, fur, papier mache, plaster, cotton chemically treated so that changes in temperature would alter the colour, pallets of expanded polystyrene, rabbit fur, straw, bread rolls sealed in plastic and covered with kaolin, and stones. Each material was chosen for the capacity to determine its own outcome, reducing the transformative input of the artist's hand to virtually nil. The Achrome here is not without a layer of irony: cotton wool appeals so directly to the sense of touch and to associations from the medical to the maternal that the viewer is under pressure to resist the pull of association and to lose themselves in the actuality of the Achrome. 'Symbolism and description, memories, misty impressions, of childhood, pictoricism, sentimentalism: all this must be absolutely excluded' (Piero Manzoni, Ibid., p.17).

Far from Klein's conviction in the transcendental, with his notion of the body as a 'living paintbrush', Manzoni worked by the edict, 'being is all that counts', using the Achromes as samples of unhampered existence. Made in the last years of his young life, there is a tender poignancy in this particular Achrome's stand for 'being' - a stand that, conceptually and materially, remains astonishingly fresh.