78 - Guido Albanello (1952)

Guido Albanello (1952) Venice. View of the city from the island of San Giorgio Maggiore Lithograph on paper 80.8 x 158.8 cm Signature: “Guido Albanello” on the plate Date: "MMIV" (2004) Other inscriptions: title and publisher on the plate; edition number (“331/600”) written in pen on the front Distinctive features: dry stamp “Gilberto Padovani Editore” on the front Provenance: Veneto Banca SpA in LCA Condition. Support: 95% Condition. Surface: 95% For direct WhatsApp assistance before and during the live auction: +39 346 12 999 80 // Direct assistance via WhatsApp before and during the auction: +39 346 12 999 80 In a letter from 1934, the poet Camillo Sbarbaro (1888–1967) recalls the genesis of the work as follows: “By chance, one summer I happened to meet that domineering sculptor, Arturo Martini. I found him in a tiny studio in Albisola where he was, so to speak, giving birth to one of his terracotta works: the bust of a young girl with tight braids, a little cap, and a dreamy shyness on her already serious face. The figure was still lifeless. ‘Now I’ll wake her up,’ he told us. That piece of clay was alive to him; this was clear not only from his words and voice, but from the way he handled it: alive and in need of care. Every detail became real the moment it was articulated; it fit perfectly; it illuminated the work, giving it its own spirit.” (C. Sbarbaro, “Scampoli,” Florence 1960, p. 77, also cited in S. Riolfo Marengo, “Camillo Sbarbaro, Angelo Barile, and Arturo Martini’s ‘Nena’” in “Risorse,” March 1988, and in N. Stringa, “Arturo Martini,” Rome 2005, pp. 90–91). “Nena” is the affectionate nickname given within the Martini household to their daughter Maria, whom the sculptor depicts in this terracotta piece at around 9 or 10 years of age, imagining her—as he himself recounts in a 1932 letter to the critic Gino Damerini, recently brought to light by Nico Stringa ("Arturo Martini. The Magic of Ceramics. The Terracottas and Majolicas of the Costantino Barile Collection," exhibition catalog, Contini, Cortina, December 29, 2018–April 22, 2019, p. 14)—as she looks out the train window, heading toward boarding school. The base replicates the space of the train window, thus projecting the figure toward us. The work was a huge success, convincing Martini to produce several copies, in terracotta and refractory terracotta; the first of these was exhibited in Turin in 1930 under the title “La mia bambina” (“My Little Girl”) and became part of the Royal Collections. As Valerio Terraroli notes in his commentary on another example (Edgallery, Piacenza), Carrà himself speaks of it with enthusiasm: “Here, realistic observation tends to become style and linear harmony, and already the material vibrates with a new rigor of natural truth that is no longer merely the architecture of volume, but restrained form and poetic sentiment” (Carrà 1933, cited in “Arturo Martini” 2014, p. 60). While Martini’s works as a whole demonstrate a re-examination of the theme of melancholy, the Veneto Banca terracotta sculpture is characterized by greater immediacy and simplicity of gesture—evident also in the unglazed clay—and, overall, by a more pronounced sense of purity.