Revolutionary Italian artist whose abstract expressionism fused politics with wild, sensuous painting
"The Italian painter Emilio Vedova, who has died
aged 87, was a veteran of one of the 20th century's most bitter artistic
conflicts - the "battle of styles" in the 1950s between the
neo-realists and the pioneers of expressive abstraction. Like many
fierce quarrels, this dispute was conducted between former friends, in
this case the leftwing intellectuals who had taken part in the Italian
resistance during the second world war. Some of them believed that
socialist painters should follow the example of Picasso's Guernica and
create overtly political, figurative images, preferably on a grand
scale; others, including Vedova, argued that revolutionary art had, by
its very nature, to be abstract.This
conviction led him, in the 1950s, to fill his pictures with wild
patterns of smeared, poured and dripped paint. He became a radical in
both politics and technique, truly a Jackson Pollock of the barricades.The third of seven children, Vedova was born into a Venetian artisan
family: his father was a house painter and decorator. By the age of 11,
Emilio was forced to earn his living, initially in a factory and then in
the studios of a photographer and restorer. Although he briefly took
evening art classes at the Scuola dei Carmini in Venice, he was mainly
self-taught, cutting his teeth with sketches of local buildings and
Renaissance paintings.In 1937 Vedova made two pictures, The Raising of
Lazarus and Crucifixion from Behind, whose bold light effects and
unusual viewpoints were undoubtedly inspired by the 16th-century artist
Tintoretto. But his most extraordinary work that year, a representation
of his own naked body reflected in a mirror on the floor, also showed
more contemporary influences, especially from Maurice de Vlaminck and
Georges Rouault. Densely painted on coarse, unprimed canvas, it is one
of the rawest, most visceral self-portraits of the 20th century.During
the second world war, Vedova lived mostly away from Venice. He was
involved in 1943 with Corrente, a Milanese group whose manifesto
proclaimed "the revolutionary function of painting ... With our painting
we are going to hoist flags." Soon afterwards he joined the resistance
in Rome, recording his experiences in the partisan drawings that were
later exhibited across Italy.At the end of the war Vedova returned to Venice,
where his work became progressively more abstract, combining sombre
tones with flat, angular planes partly influenced by cubism and
futurism. These black geometries eloquently express the anxiety and
anguish of the period. The World on its Tiptoes (1946) and The Struggle
(1949) were followed in 1950 by Concentration Camp, a pattern of spiky
shapes with a pool of red at its core.Such
imagery clearly followed the principles of the manifesto Beyond
Guernica, co-signed by Vedova in 1946, which urged artists to engage
with reality without being naturalistic. For a short while the division
between figurative and abstract painters was concealed by the Fronte
Nuovo delle Arti, which Vedova helped to found in 1947. However, by 1952
he had joined the more avant-garde Gruppo degli Otto, led by the critic
Lionello Venturi. The uneasy alliance had collapsed.By
this time Vedova had also developed contacts abroad, especially in New
York, where he exhibited for the first time in 1951. His style was now
close to the free abstraction of French art informel and American action
painting, but, unlike many of his foreign contemporaries, Vedova saw
the spirit of revolution in even the most sensuous, luscious
brushstrokes. And if the spectators did not share his vision, they could
at least read the titles - Protest Cycle, Universal Manifesto, Korea.References
to contemporary events became even more urgent when Vedova was made an
official artist-in-residence in Berlin just two years after the
construction of the wall in 1961. Working in a studio formerly occupied
by the Nazi sculptor Arno Breker, he created the Absurd Berlin Diary 64,
a colossal assemblage of jagged wooden pieces, aggressively painted in
clashing colours, which conveyed the trauma of the divided city. Hung
from the ceiling or arranged untidily across the gallery floor, often
linked by hinges like parodies of medieval polyptychs, the panels also
illustrated the artist's desire to liberate art from its conventional
setting in a frame on a wall. This preoccupation, which inspired the
equally audacious Arte Povera movement, had first appeared in 1959, when
Vedova placed large abstract canvases across the corners and ceiling of
a room in the Palazzo Grassi in Venice. Its most extraordinary
expression was achieved through the use of light in a number of
exhibitions and theatrical stagings, beginning in 1961 with a production
of Luigi Nono's socialist opera, Intolleranza 60.Most
remarkable of all was the installation Space/Plurimo/Light, which
Vedova created for the 1967 Montreal Expo. Here he used fragments of
Murano glass to project moving sheets of colour, accompanied by
experimental music, across a vast space, overwhelming the visitor with
light and sound.In Vedova's sculpture the
boundaries between the image and its surroundings were often broken down
by the presence of dramatic voids. In the Laceration Cycles (1977-78),
graffiti-covered sheets were pierced with holes and slits, while in
Studies for a Space, a decade later, a tight knot of twisted tubes and
wires erupted from otherwise hollow cylinders.At
the same time Vedova began a series of circular panels spattered with
paint - modern tondi, suspended, slanted or propped against each other,
but never hung neatly on the wall. These culminated in He Who Burns a
Book Burns a Man (1993), in which hinged wooden discs, covered with
ashes and fragments of words, suggested the pages of a charred, ripped
book. Made soon after the shelling of the library at Sarajevo during the
Bosnian wars, they evoked the intolerance and destruction that had
characterised much of the artist's lifetime.Vedova's
strong political motivation could not protect him forever from the
embrace of the establishment, and in 1996 he was awarded the
grandiloquent title of Cavaliere di Gran Croce della Repubblica
Italiana; he even designed a tapestry for the library of the Italian
senate in Rome. But he remained to the end a leftwing icon, the bearded,
bespectacled hero of radical Italian art. His wife Annabianca
predeceased him by a month.· Emilio Vedova, artist, born August 9 1919; died October 25 2006." ( theguardian.com )
