MARINO MARINI (1901-1980) – Sir Christopher Ondaatje admires the drawings, etchings, lithographs and sculptures of the Italian artist famous for his stylised equestrian statues. – BY SIR CHRISTOPHER ONDAATJE – eLanka
Source: Sri Lankan Anchorman
Marino Marini was born in Postoia, Italy, not far from the church of San Pietro on 27 February 1901. He assimilated from his earliest youth impressions of Tuscan Romanesque and Gothic churches and their sculpture. Marino and his twin sister Egle both attended the Academia di Belle Arti in Florence starting in 1917. There was no parental support for his artistic tendencies and the close relationship with his sister made up for an otherwise clouded relationship with his parents. His mother was a very religious woman and took her children to all the old churches in Pistoia – so the young Marini must have been influenced by the carved pulpits of Giovanni and Andrea Pisano. Nevertheless when he made his first trip to Paris after the First World War (1918) the practice of sculpture was very far from his thoughts.
It was a city barely emerging from the brutal pressure of war. Cubism, already in a late phase, set the tone in painting. He had ambitions to be a painter, but he may have noticed the work of some of his older contemporaries the sculptors Brancusi, Duchamp-Villon, Lipchitz, Archipenko and Zadkine. They were sculptors who followed a technically different line than the painters. When Marini returned to Italy he was still an ambitious young painter and in the Academia he enrolled in the painting courses of Augusteo Bastianini and Galileo Chini. It was through Chini that Marini became captivated by the Austrian Gustav Klimt – at that time unknown in Italy.
It wasn’t until 1922, when he enrolled in a sculpture course given by Domenico Trentacoste, that Marini undertook to practise sculpture as well as painting. In 1926 he moved into his first studio, and in 1928 he returned to Paris enviously intent on becoming a sculptor.
The impression the young Tuscan made in those days is recorded for us by the painter Filippo de Pisis, who had an atelier in Paris that Marini visited one day. De Pisis speaks of it in the introduction to his book on Marini (‘Marino Marini’, Conchiglia, Milan, 1941):
“I like to recall those days long ago in Paris, in my atelier in Rue Servandoni, when the young artist came to see me for the first time. And I can imagine that his great and true talent had already been formed earlier in the lovely landscape of his native Pistoia. The same is true of his physical nobility, the ring of his voice, and his cultured gestures of perfect formal beauty. And of the friendliness of his being, his innate anti-Romantic melancholy, and finally the delicacy of his feelings, which recoiled from literary posturing and the useless entanglements of artists.”
– Marino Marini:
Sculpture, Painting, Drawing
by A.M. Hammermacher
Non-Frenchmen were dominant in Paris sculpture: Pevsner, Eargallo, Archipenko, Giacometti, Calder, ARP, Gonzalez, and even Picasso. But they were too intent on experiment. There was much for the young Marini to observe, particularly the powerful works of Brancusi and Medardo Rosso. He realised that sculpture had to be wrenched out of its isolation and brought into a relationship with real life. He also realised a yearning to return to his native land.
And then Marini found Arturo Martini, who came to Paris from Treviso and who wavered between cubism and tradition, but whose style was reinforced by traditions of the past. Seventeen years older than Marini, he did not have the youthful impressions of sculpture that the youthful Tuscan Marini had. Instead, the Venetian Martini fostered a different notion of light and form – more the birthright of painters than of sculptors. Yet they molded together, disputed their differences as if unaffected by Martini’s tempestuous productions and he witnessed the development of his best work from 1929 to 1938. But Marini was also bound by the traditions of his Tuscan past and he continued to be influenced by the Etruscan objects he saw in the Archaeological Museum in Florence.
Martini must have sensed Marini’s future evolution and even one of parallel achievement, because he invited the young artist to join him as a teacher at the Instituto Superiore della Industrie Artistiche in the Villa Reale, in Monza near Milan in 1929. Marini thus was forced to leave his beloved Tuscany and Florence for the northern, more modern Milan. But he took the brave decision realising that he had to ignore history to further his artistic development. Marini’s arrival in Milan came to have symbolic meaning. The image of dynamic modern life in Milan not only witnessed the maturation of Martini’s dramatic works: Mother in wood (1929); and Woman in the Sun (1930), but was the second influence in the formation of Marini as a sculptor. He broke away from history and interpreted his own conception of life and his attitude towards it.
During the Second World War Arturo Martini returned to a more traditional style and became the semi-official sculptor of the fascist regime in Italy. Despite his recognition and admiration for Martini’s ability as a sculptor, these war years were a troublesome period emotionally for Marini. During the years 1930 to 1940 he developed three seminal motifs – horses, men, and women – the internal accord between archaism and the possibilities of form in contemporary life.
Paris had given Marini the idea of nearly unlimited possibilities in Cubism, Surrealism, Abstraction, and Constructivism. This freedom was imaginary. Marini had the strength not to surrender to the enticingly abundant vistas of experimentation. The wisdom inspired by the individuality he already desired, though vaguely, assured him that only the discovery of his own path was important. His openness to life, his passionately eager being, temperamentally fascinated by living, had to be harmonised with a profound thirst for seclusion, silence, and reticence.
– Marino Marini
Sculpture, Painting, Drawing
By A.M. Hammermacher
In 1938 Marini married Mercedes Pedrazzini of Tessin, Switzerland and continued to work at the Instituto Superiore in Monza until 1940, but then accepted a professorship in sculpture at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, Milan. However the fascist war years in Italy, and possibly his political relationship with Martini bothered Marini to a point that he went into exile in Switzerland in 1943. He exhibited in Basel, Bern, and Zurich, but did not return to Milan until after the war in 1946. Marini succeeded in reserving his confessions and sculptural feelings for his work. It is this relative impenetrability that gives Marini’s work its mysterious attractiveness. Marini did not create women, men, horses – but in their likeness created symbolic new beings out of wood, cast bronze, and even ceramic. The complicated problem of their form and the meaning of their motif are fused. For years Marini is known to have kept figures of women or horses in his studio working on them again and again, never letting them go. His creations are charged with his psychic energy. He has given these figures much of his own life. His biographer Raffaele Carrieri says of him:
“He would get up at night to tap at, touch, and stroke the objects made by day, to restore the reality of communication broken by darkness. This tells more about the sculptor than all the ingenious dissertations on the influence of the Etruscans or the Egyptians on his work.”
Marini spent the years 1929 to 1940 sculpting figures in which tension is derived not from motion but from potential motion. This is important. His horses do not move or rest but stand, ready to leap. Anticipation is a key element of his creativity. Marini’s first horses, 1935, had something of the Tuscan masters. Later, after 1940, they had something of the Chinese tomb horses of the Tang period. He followed political and cultural paths other than those of a pseudo-heroic Romanism under Mussolini. He refused to seek refuge in the glories of that culture’s past and refused to succumb to the temptations of Fascist-menaced creations as did his older compère Martini.
Portraits soon became the outlet in Marini’s sculpture for his eager, impressioned interest in contemporary man, whose unfinished history lies exposed. It is thus, being portraiture, a limited form of expression. But for that point in time it was the greatest possible and earliest form of expression of living reality available to Marini. Motifs expressing living reality were to develop and expand in the nudes and horses. The portrait was the first conquest.
– Marino Marini
Sculpture, Painting, Drawing
By A.M. Hammermacher
Marini’s portraits are never pleasant. They are posed unmasked rather than poses respected. The portrayal is never a passive one – but an emotional close-up as if Marini were fused with his subject. His sculptures are immobile and almost autobiographical. He once said to Martini:
“Sculpture is silence.”
After Marini married Mercedes Pedrazzini he went on working until the bombs destroyed his works and his studio. He left Switzerland dejected and depressed in 1943 where he was not allowed to accept commissions or cast bronze. He was forced to work in plaster or clay. It was a period of waiting for the end of war and it had a marked effect on Marini’s change of style, which demonstrated, from a spiritual point of view, a tendency towards the sad and tragic.
In his life Marini developed several themes in sculpture: equestrian, nudes, portraits and circus figures. He developed mythical images by interpreting classical themes in modern concerns and techniques. He is particularly famous for his series of stylised equestrian statues, which feature a man with outstretched arms on a horse. The evolution of the horse and rider reflects his response to the changing modern world. At first in 1936 the proportions of horse and rider are slender – both poised, formal and calm. By the next year the horse is depicted rearing and the rider gesturing. By 1940 the forms are simpler and more archaic and the proportions squatter.
After World War II, and in the late 1940s, the horse is planted, immobile, with neck extended, ears pinned back, mouth open. In later works the rider is increasingly oblivious of his mount – involved with his own anxieties. In his final works the rider is unseated as the horse falls to the ground – an apocalyptic image of lost control paralleling Marini’s growing despair for the future of the world.
Marino Marini died on 6 August 1980 and is buried at Cimitero Cummunale of Pistoia, Toscana, Italy. There is a museum dedicated to his work in the former church of San Pancrazio in Florence.
– Sir Christopher Ondaatje is the author of The Last Colonial. The author acknowledges that he has quoted liberally from Wikipedia, and Marino Marini: Sculpture, Painting, Drawing by A.M. Hammermacher (1970).
