Michelangelo Pistoletto

Acquired in 1969

Hamburg, Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Große Retrospecktive, 2003
Leipzig, Museum der Bildenden Künste, Gunter Sachs, 2008, p. 231
Moscow, Museum Tsaritsyno, Gunter Sachs, 2009

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is brighter and more vibrant in the original. The catalogue illustration fails to convey the reflective mirrored surface of the original. Condition: There are several scratches and associated losses to the paper tissued figure, as visible in the catalogue illustration, most notably below the figure's knees and towards the centre of the figure's jacket. Raking light reveals hairline surface scratches scattered in places throughout. There is a hole to the centre of the left edge where a door handle has previously been attached by the owner, and a painted door on the reverse. There are minor creases and surface irregularities to the tissue paper, notably a diagonal crease towards the top of the figure. There is a media spot 15cm. below the figure's handkercheif and some general light wear.
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"The purpose and result of my mirror painting was to carry art to the edges of life in order to verify the entire system in which both of them function." The artist in: Exhibition Catalogue, Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art,  Michelangelo Pistoletto: From One to Many, 1956-1974, 2010-2011, p.327

Acquired almost immediately after its creation in 1968, Pistoletto's remarkable Mirror Painting L'homme au Téléphone, occupied a prominent position in the spectacular entrance hall of Gunter Sachs' St. Moritz apartment. Flamboyantly refurbished after the Palace Hotel fire of 1967, Sachs' maisonette - located in the top two floors of the hotel's tower - was dedicated to the creation of a luxurious setting for his art collection. Upon entering Sachs' ostentatious and progressive art-environment, guests would catch a glimpse of their reflection in Pistoletto's masterpiece of trompe l'oeil illusionism. Simultaneously, the viewer and the intermediary figure of Pistoletto's 'painting' are conflated and two spectral worlds collide: through the reflected surface of the artwork and via a remarkable manipulation of concept and material, the very nature of time, space and representation are called into question.  Belonging to the famous and iconic corpus of Quadri Specchianti, or Mirror Paintings, the present work explores art's ability to mirror the dynamism and mutability of life. At once, Pistoletto's poetic dialogue with materials highlights his position as a chief exponent of the Italian Arte Povera movement, whilst invoking a dialogue with the aesthetic concerns of Pop Art. Indeed, bought by Gunter Sachs almost immediately after its execution, Pistoletto's L'homme au Téléphone underlines the developmental transition towards the Pop oriented works Sachs would devote his collecting activity to in the 1970s.

Dissatisfied with the traditional manner in which painting was merely reproducing reality, he discovered the potential of reflection as a means of creating a meaningful image, projecting himself and the viewer through time into the same composition. Having first experimented with surface reflection in 1956 with a series of self-portraits on varnished and shiny backgrounds, Pistoletto refined his method from 1961 instead using highly polished stainless steel onto which he pasted painted tissue paper. By grafting a photo-realistic and life-size human figure onto an infinitely changeable mirrored surface, Pistoletto invokes jarring spatial disparity. Painted after a photographic source onto delicate tissue, the figure's static representation and fusion with the metallic surface compounds a representational dichotomy between the inert painted image and the constant evolution of mirrored reflections.

Pistolleto's hand-painted and life-size images of people were intended both to integrate the environment and the viewer into his work, and question the nature of representation. Providing a poetic chronology of his oeuvre, Pistoletto's series of mirror works look into the past and the future simultaneously, eliding traditional classification as they continue to reflect an ever changing world around them. The viewer's space is interwoven with the artist's work and vision becomes an integral and dynamic part of the composition. Indeed, the perpetually mutating content of the mirror works ultimately yields an inquiry into the fourth dimension: time. As Pistoletto recalls, "In traditional painting, representation and drawing covers the entire surface. This is a static aspect that has come down through the years as a univocal signal. It can correspond to the figure that I place on the surfaces of the mirror painting, a fixed signal, an image 'snapped' at a certain moment. But in my mirror paintings the image co-exists with every present moment... In my works the current time of the future is already included in the continuous mobility of the images, in the constantly renewed present of the reflection" (the artist in: Exhibition Catalogue, New York, P.S 1 Contemporary Art Center, Pistoletto, Division and Multiplication of the Mirror, 1988, p.31).

This 'continuous mobility' unites the work with the beholder and an outside context to engender an effect that fundamentally underlines impermanence and the transience of an experienced communal reality. In 1968 these experiential overtones were thematised in Pistoletto's solo exhibition at the Galleria L'Attico in Rome. For this show, Pistoletto invited the active participation of the public to create an extraordinary animated tableau in front of a selection of Mirror Paintings. Pistoletto furnished costumes from various historical periods which the attendees were invited to select; herein, this show operated as a choreography of the self with the mirror paintings providing the means for people to see themselves reflected while shifting between their one and many masked selves. As outlined by Gabriele Guercio, the comingling of fiction and reality inherent to Pistoletto's mise-en-scéne "rendered manifest that one's life occurs within at least two spaces, if not more, and that one always stands at the threshold, neither here nor beyond" (Gabriele Guercio, 'A Community of Non-All', Exhibition Catalogue, Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Michelangelo Pistoletto: From One to Many, 1956-1974, 2010-11, p. 130).

Peripheral vision, a sight we use primarily for defence, for survival, for a perception of the enveloping world, is one of the senses activated when confronted with the work of Michelangelo Pistoletto. Where the mirror acts as a threshold between the world of real images and that of those reflected, the static figure acts as an in-between, at once represented within the composition and mastering it from the outside, blurring further the fluctuating boundaries between physical and pictorial space. Our reality enters the closed and limited arena of painting, reflecting the futurist Carlo Carra's prediction of 1910 that "we will put the viewer inside the painting." The placement of overlapping objects is arranged in such a way that we both see and are actually in Pistoletto's vision; one characterised by its perfect balance of attracting, engaging, involving, holding and releasing the viewer both metaphorically and in practice. Crossing the boundary between art and life, Pistoletto's employment of the mirror's reflective surface acts as a metaphor for the idea of nature, thereby sanctioning the removal of simulated reality. The represented image comes from the mirror itself, and in so doing, arouses our awareness of the illusion of painting. With his iconic 'Mirror Paintings' Pistoletto achieves one of the most powerful examinations of the relationship between artist and viewer in the history of Western art.