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PROPERTY OF A DISTINGUISHED PRIVATE COLLECTOR
Lot 15AR
MARINO MARINI(1901-1980)Cavalli e cavalieri
Amended
7 – 8 April 2022, 16:00 BST
London, New Bond StreetSold for £31,800 inc. premium
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MARINO MARINI (1901-1980)
Cavalli e cavalieri
signed and dated 'Marino 1970' (lower right)
oil on paper
39.3 x 51.1cm (15 1/2 x 20 1/8in).
Executed in 1970
signed and dated 'Marino 1970' (lower right)
oil on paper
39.3 x 51.1cm (15 1/2 x 20 1/8in).
Executed in 1970
Footnotes
The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by the Fondazione Marino Marini.
Provenance
Dominion Gallery, Montreal, no. B6324 (possibly acquired directly from the artist in the 1980s).
Private collection, Switzerland & UK (acquired from the above circa 1997).
Exhibited
Toronto, Istituto Italiano di Cultura, Marino Marini: Sculptures, paintings, drawings, 27 May – 11 July 1998.
A cavalry rider of the avant-garde, Marino Marini forged a valiant artistic pathway that was in sync with the strident drumbeats of Modernity. Utilising the horse and rider as a lifelong leitmotif, Marini conveyed an exhaustive breadth of drama and emotion, scaling the divide between primeval furore and contemporary anxiety. By enunciating this classical trope with the fragmented language of his own zeitgeist, Marini engendered deep and dynamic meditations on the state of the world and man's relationship with it. Completed ten years before his passing at the age of 79, Cavalli e cavalieri represents a chapter in which Marini's horses and riders are reduced to ideas or memories. The present work therefore embodies the distilled values of a master artist who had reached the apex of his creative vision.
Marini grew up in the bucolic environs of Tuscany, enveloped in sun-drenched natural landscapes dotted with the emotive frescoes of Giotto and Masaccio. He strongly identified as a descendent of the Etruscans – a tendency which manifested in the ancient and mythical qualities of his art. Marini learned the language and imagery of the early Renaissance and the international Gothic style whilst enrolled at the Accademia di Belli Arti in Florence from 1917, thence developing a personal connection with Northern European sculpture and ancient cave paintings. His travels placed him at the centre of the European avant-garde: in Paris he associated with Pablo Picasso and Giorgio de Chirico, and then in Switzerland he befriended Germaine Richier and Alberto Giacometti. The creative discourse between Marini and Giacometti resounded in their shared preferences for attenuated forms, expressive textures and rigid abstraction. After starring in the Twentieth-Century Italian Art exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1949), Marini became ingratiated with an exciting new generation of post-war artists, among them Lyonel Feininger, Max Beckmann and Alexander Calder.
The horse and rider first appeared in Marini's work in 1936, after he visited Der Bamberger Reiter, an early thirteenth century equestrian sculpture at the Cathedral of Bamberg in Germany. In Marini's first iterations of the subject, his riders and their steeds possess elongated physiques, their poses calm and formal. By 1940, they evolve into more squat, simplified, archaic forms. After the Second World War, the horses often have their mouths open in silent screams, their ears pinned back in ecstasy or anguish. Indeed, Marini had witnessed true atrocities under the Italian fascist regime, including watching terrified peasants fleeing from armed forces on horseback. In ensuing years, Marini's riders appear to be dislocated from their mounts and focused on their inner human turmoil, reflecting a society bent by trauma, grief and apathy. By 1970 – and in the present work – the equestrian motif had been reduced into a kind of patterned obscurity, one that favoured impulse and impression over object and circumstance. This chronological disintegration was for Marini an extended metaphor for mankind's expulsion from earthly paradise into the cruel reality of war.
In Cavalli e cavalieri, Marini creates mysteries that are just as vivid as his colours and forms. Bright, full-bodied black and blue oil paints coalesce into evocations rather than descriptions of the horses and riders, omitting any possible whispers of individualisation. Marini's lively dabs and strokes resonate across the surface of the paper in thick staccato, generating forms that resemble musical notations or grammatical symbols. The needle-thin lines with which he incises the subjects grants them a certain architecture, forming rivulets of violence and tension. With their arms raised in defiance, they could be cavalry units undertaking a drill or manoeuvre, charging forth in sync. Indeed, their harmonious colours could evoke a common uniform or military standard. Marini conjures up a saturated backdrop beneath them with off-white paint, sustaining the flatness and compression of the wider mise-en-scène.
In their symmetry and abstraction, Marini's horses and riders resemble a Rorschach test, a psychological method by which one's perceptions of inkblots are recorded and analysed using a series of algorithms. In this, the present composition manifests psychoanalytical interpretations of his work, by which critics have understood the horses to signify man's primal erotic instinct – a force that must be harnessed and controlled by the riders. The horses also provide links to history and tradition, as Herbert Reed has observed: 'The taming of the wild horse marked a definite stage in the evolution of human civilization. But such symbolism apart, the horse, by its animal form... is in itself a thing of beauty that naturally appeals to the artist... Marini, in selecting this animal as a subject, is showing a predilection as old as art itself. It is all the more amazing, therefore, that he should have given a new treatment to the subject' (H. Read, P. Waldberg & G. di San Lazzaro, Marino Marini, Complete Works, Milan, 1970, p. 12).
For Marini, tradition was a mode through which he could delineate mankind's relationship with the world, its values and its events. In this, he distinguished himself from the Italian Futurists, whose art embodied the mechanical and industrial advancements of their age. Nevertheless, he sought to pervert the epic and imperial overtones of the equestrian type, dismantling its mythology of uono di virtù, the individual virtuous hero. He considered this to be, 'my own way of reacting against the imperialist pathos of official Fascist art... I am no longer seeking, in my own equestrian figures, to celebrate the triumph of any victorious hero. On the contrary, I seek to commemorate in them something tragic – in fact, a kind of 'Twilight of Man', a defeat rather than a victory' (Marini quoted in É. Roditi, Dialogues: Conversations with European Artists at Mid-century, London, 1990, p. 87).
Marini was keenly aware of the trajectory of the equestrian trope throughout history, placing himself in a dialogue with his antique forerunners and his avant-garde contemporaries. As he explained to the critic Édouard Roditi, equestrian motifs once 'set out to exalt a triumphant hero, a conqueror like Marcus Aurelius... The Romantic painters were already addicted to a cult of the horse as an aristocratic beast... From Géricault and Constantin Guys to Degas and Dufy, this cult of the horse found its expression in a new attitude toward sport and military life... In Odilon Redon's visionary renderings of horses and later in those of Picasso and Chirico, we then see the horse become part of the fauna of a world of dreams and myths' (Ibid., p. 86).
As archetypes that endure throughout art history – and that sustain the microcosm of his oeuvre – horses and riders carried Marini's expansive visions of the world. These visions evolved through his encounters with both art and atrocity. In the present work, Marini succeeds in shifting these emblems of status and power into expressions of dependence, vulnerability, unity and helplessness. Having remained in a distinguished private collection for a quarter of a century, Cavalli e cavalieri is a rare and captivating example of Marini's mature style, one that truly marks him as a protagonist of Modern Italian art.
Saleroom notices
Please note that the estimates of this lot should read as £25,000 - 35,000.