Antonio Berni (1905-1981)

Galería Ruth Benzacar, Buenos Aires
Sale: Christie's, New York, Important, Latin American Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture, November 26, 1996, lot 13, illustrated in color

Banco Velox, Jorge López Anaya, et. al., Antonio Berni, Buenos Aires, 1997, p. 131, illustrated in color
Cristina Rossi, Antonio Berni. Lecturas en tiempo presente, Buenos Aires, 2010, p. 66, illustrated in color
Lasar Segall. Un Expresionista Brasileño (exhibition catalogue), Buenos Aires, 2012, p. 266, illustrated in color

This large painting has never been cleaned or varnished, nor should it be. The paint layer is stable. The canvas is well stretched on its original stretcher. While the stretcher may not be modern or perfectly made, it is functional. The artist extended the canvas by 6 or 7 inches along the bottom edge; there are two horizontal additions here. There are a few losses and restorations associated with these joins in the canvas, but there are essentially no other restorations. The painting is in beautiful condition. (This condition report has been provided courtesy of Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc.)
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.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

Antonio Berni (1905-1981) is considered one of the leading social realist painters in Latin America. Throughout his pictorial production, which spans from the late 1920s until his death, Berni maintained a commitment to a politically engaged art, which he renewed with formal experimentation. Born in Rosario of Italian immigrant parents, Berni was the youngest of three children. In 1915, at the age of ten, he was apprenticed in the local stained glass workshop, and the following year he began studying drawing and painting with Eugenio Fornels and Enrique Munnè at the Centre Catalá in Rosario, a working class club that practiced anarchist and socialist ideals. In 1925 he went to Europe on a scholarship awarded by the Rosario Jockey Club; he continued his studies in Madrid and then in Paris with both André Lhote and Othon Friesz. While in Paris he became friendly with the surrealists and read Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx. His paintings of the late 1920s reflect the influence of Giorgio de Chirico. Back in Buenos Aires in 1930, he became aware of the social distress and poverty caused by the world economic crisis, and began painting working class and social protest themes on large scale canvases. The sizes of these pictures were an alternative to public walls for murals, which did not exist in Argentina. In 1931 Berni briefly joined the Argentinean Communist Party, resigning in 1932. In 1933 when the Mexican muralist Siqueiros travelled to Argentina, Berni and fellow painters Lino Enea Spilimbergo, Juan Carlos Castagnino and Enrique Lázaro, collaborated with him on the mural Plastic Exercise in a private residence in a suburb of Buenos Aires.

Berni’s paintings of the 1930s, which he defined as Nuevo realismo, consist of solidly sculptural forms and sharp focus details that bring to mind both the paintings of the Italian Novecento and German Neue Sachlichkeit. He defined the style as representing “the new hero and the new drama in a universal language of apparent formal modernity.”[1] Important works from this period are the paintings Desocupados and Manifestación, which synthesize monumental forms, intense details and themes of social unrest. By the late 1940s and 1950s Berni’s forms became flatter, his colors more intense and his handling of pigments more painterly and expressive.

Los Emigrantes, Homenaje a Segall, 1956, is one of Berni’s most significant canvases of that decade. As the title indicates, Berni pays homage to the Brazilian artist Lasar Segall (1891-1957), who with his cubo-expressionist style depicted immigrants on the deck of a ship in a group of drypoint prints of 1929 and an oil painting of 1939-40. Berni’s large vertical canvas Los Emigrantes was painted the same year as the other major works Agua and Los Algodoneros. All three share a palette with more acidic color, looser brushwork and thick textures. The composition represents the bow of a ship with a mast, ropes, chains and pulleys, etc., among which are sixteen people making their immigrant voyage. They are the poorest of the poor and as such cannot afford to travel in cabins, even in steerage. From the foreground to the middle ground we encounter twelve figures consisting of three children and nine adults; they are huddled together, stressing the crowdedness of the space. In the background four other figures rest against a group of wooden logs. All together there are nine females and seven males, which range in age from infancy to mature and old; this allows the artist to depict the full range of the human family that experiences immigration. All are modestly if not shabbily dressed. Some are sleeping, while others are lost in thought, with facial expressions that denote exhaustion and preoccupation. The sky in the background is dark and stormy, while the sea, painted in deep greens and blues, is choppy. The yellow ochre of the deck frames the pyramid like group of figures and objects with their red, green, blue and brown colors.

Even though this voyage has its share of uncertainty, within the group of figures hope is present in the three depicted children; a girl with golden locks, a boy sleeping wrapped in a blanket, another feeding at his mother’s breast. The most powerful symbol of hope in the composition is the sleeping pregnant woman in the foreground. Dressed in red and laying on her spouse’s legs, which strikingly reminds us of Pablo Picasso´s famous La Sieste,1919, her curved and sensual body is intensely defined by the color of her clothing. Her powerful belly carries a new life to a new world. In spite of the struggle and peril depicted by Berni in this monumental picture, the work functions as a life affirming statement. Immigration has been a part of human history from the start, today it is a highly contested issue. Berni chose to depict these immigrants through a vision of compassion and solidarity, which was grounded in what the artist defined as “my sense of justice, of equity, a state of loving and a feeling of fraternity.”[2]

Alejandro Anreus, Ph.D., Professor of Art History and Latin American/Latino Studies, William Paterson University

[1]Antonio Berni, “El nuevo realismo,” Forma (August 1936), unpaginated.
[2]Pedro Laborda, “Entrevista a Antonio Berni,”El Tribuno del Domingo (August 2 1981), p. 11