Enrico Donati - Masters of Surrealism

 

 Enrico Donati studied economics at the Università degli Studi, Pavia, and in 1934 moved to the USA, where he attended the New School for Social Research and the Art Students League of New York. His first one-man shows were in New York in 1942, at the New School for Social Research and the Passedoit Gallery. At this stage he was clearly drawn to Surrealism. This was reinforced by meeting André Breton and coming into contact with Marcel Duchamp and the other European Surrealists in New York at the time.
"During the early 1940s, Donati made Surrealist paintings in an abstract biomorphic style that astonish the eye and boggle the mind. Trouble-fête (Killjoy), from 1944, is typical of his work in this early period. In this strange and intricate composition, weird protoplasmic entities loom up out of the darkness, some of the them glowing with bioluminescence like deep-sea creatures, others bathed in rainbow hues. The picture space is complex, seemingly three-layered: At the bottom of the canvas is the ocean floor, above it is a landscape receding into the distance, and above that is a black sky. It could be night on earth, or it could be the perpetual blackness of the interstellar void, but really it is inner space. As a glimpse into the unconscious, Trouble-fête is particularly persuasive because instead of stocking its mindscape with conventional pop-Freudian symbols, it confronts us with figures that are individual, idiosyncratic, and baffling.While the painting could be called figurative, Donati is using illusionistic space and carefully rendered surface detail in an essentially abstract way. His figures—more like the distended bladders of Bosch’s hell than anything that might show up to pose in a painter’s studio—at first sight may seem to resemble animals, plants, or people, but upon closer inspection the resemblance melts away. What Donati has given us is the experience of a dream, delivered with the classic Surrealist one-two punch of control and lack of control—polish carefully applied to the wild products of automatism."/artandantiquesmag.com/

 

Abstract expressionism M.Shertz,E.Donati,J.Hurtubise

Max Shertz

 

Max Shertz (March 25, 1933 – October 15, 2009) was an American artist, painter, sculptor, writer, poet, and teacher. Shertz is known for his "Art of the Unconscious" style of abstract expressionism. His works are displayed and collected by museums, public institutions, and collectors. In protest against the commercialization of the art world, Shertz was reclusive for the last 25 years of his life, and the work Shertz produced during those years has not been released to the public.Wikipedia

Enrico Donati

 

Enrico Donati (February 19, 1909 – April 25, 2008) was an American Surrealist painter and sculptor of Italian birth.Enrico Donati studied economics at the Università degli Studi, Pavia, and in 1934 moved to the USA, where he attended the New School for Social Research and the Art Students League of New York. His first one-man shows were in New York in 1942, at the New School for Social Research and the Passedoit Gallery. At this stage he was clearly drawn to Surrealism. This was reinforced by meeting André Breton and coming into contact with Marcel Duchamp and the other European Surrealists in New York at the time. A typical work of this period, St Elmo’s Fire (1944; New York, MoMA), contains strange organic formations suggestive of underwater life.
Donati was one of the organizers of the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme held in Paris in the summer of 1947, to which he contributed a painting and two sculptures. In the late 1940s he responded to the crisis in Surrealism by going through a Constructivist phase, from which he developed a calligraphic style and drew onto melted tar, or diluted paint with turpentine. He also became associated with Spatialism, founded by Lucio Fontana. Thus began his long fascination with surface and texture, including mixing paint with dust, that culminated in the 1950s in his Moonscapes, a series that has similarities with the work of Dubuffet. The fossil became a major theme for Donati through the 1960s, and he gave new importance to color in his Fossil works, for example in Red Yellow Fossil (1964; Miami, Hills Col., see Selz, p. 19). In 1961, he was given a major retrospective at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and frequently exhibited at group shows in the USA and elsewhere. He held a number of important teaching and advisory posts, including Visiting Lecturer at Yale University (1962–1972).Wikipedia

Jacques Hurtubise

Jacques Hurtubise (1939–2014) was a Canadian abstract painter, "known for his abstract, brightly coloured acrylic paintings"
Hurtubise was born on February 28, 1939 in Montreal, and studied painting at the École des beaux-arts de Montréal. Already by 1960, at age 21, he had his first major show at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.He spent much of the 1960s living in New York City and becoming part of the abstract expressionist scene there His art at that time combined geometric forms with splashed paint, and he experimented with fluorescent colors and neon light art.In the early 1970s his compositions were based on square forms, but by the late 1970s they shifted to linear patterns that resembled abstract landscapes.His later work featured "deep-black pools, rivers and geometric forms that often mask upside-down maps and text."Wikipedia