The Unknown Italian
Fausto Melotti
Anche di notte il Monte Bianco è alto 4810 metri. E la Pietà Rondanini di notte è sola con se stessa. E l’ultimo quartetto di Beethoven è conturbante anche quando nessuno lo suona. (Even at night Mont Blanc is 4,810 meters high. And at night the Rondanini Pietà is alone with herself. And Beethoven’s last quartet is disturbing even when no one plays it.) — Fausto Melotti
To some extent Fausto Melotti (1901-1986) can be described as the quiet man of Italian sculpture. Born in Rovereto in 1901, after studying physics and mathematics, Melotti enrolled at the Accademia delle Belle Arte di Brera, where he trained under Italy’s leading Symbolist sculptor Adolfo Wildt (1868-1931); there he met artist Lucio Fontana (1899-1968), and the two would remain friends and collaborators for the rest of their lives. Despite being a household name in his native Italy, Melotti, who was, indisputably, one of the most innovative artists of the twentieth century, is perhaps less well known internationally. It’s not entirely clear as to why this is, but, somewhat paradoxically; it could very well be the sheer diversity of his output. Melotti was prone to experimentation, a polymath in the truest sense, whose extraordinary intellect led him to create an extensive number and variety of artworks, including everything from figurative drawings and geometric sculptures, to cadences in brass and gold; works which were inspired by a variety of sources, often with no obvious connection, for e.g. architecture, mathematical symmetry, the ancient world, music and even folk tales. Creating such an array of works was, apparently, insufficient to keep Melotti busy, and he also found time to design, compose poetry and write, contributing essays to architecture magazine Domus, and publishing the poetry anthology Linee (meaning “lines”), for which he won the Diano Marina Prize in 1975. Despite this seemingly unrelenting creative energy, Melotti was, by nature, somewhat reserved, and unlike Fontana, he had no interest in showmanship, and courting press attention. Shy and serious-minded, he rarely travelled and kept out of the spotlight; apart from a brief sojourn in Rome during the Second World War he spent the large part of his life in Milan. Melotti’s love for the city is of course understandable, as it was, after all, the centre of Italy’s avant-garde; where in 1909 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944) founded the revolutionary Futurist movement, whose manifesto — published on the front page of French newspaper Le Figaro — called for a new aesthetic language, based on industry, war and the machine. Tired of the country’s reliance on its classical heritage, it declared war on the old order, with the words “we want to deliver Italy from its gangrene of professors, archaeologists, tourist guides and antiquaries”.
The Seven Sages (one element) 1960 (1978) by Fausto Melotti © Fondazione Fausto Melotti, Milan
Devil (c. 1935) by Fausto Melotti © Fondazione Fausto Melotti, Milan
Many young Milanese artists were inspired by the Futurists provocative actions and celebration of modernism; and early on in his career, Melotti, along with his cousin Carlo Belli (1903-1991) — the future theorist of Italian abstract art — became part of a lively group of young artists, musicians and architects including Gino Pollini (1903-1991), Luciano Baldessari (1896-1982) and Adalberto Libera (1903-1963). It wasn’t just art; the northern metropolis was fast becoming a centre of creativity, including fashion, furniture and product design, with architect Gio Ponti (1891-1979) revolutionizing not only the way in which people lived, but also the way they thought about design. Caught up in the artistic fervour of this brave and thrilling new world, Melotti quickly began experimenting with abstraction, creating a number of geometric works that were reflective of sense of order in the cosmic universe. In the 1920s and 1930s the artists output was somewhat unusual, even conflictual, as on the one hand, he was producing minimalist sculptures, full of grids and lines — perhaps, on some level, reflective of his early education in mathematics and physics — and on the other, he was still a figurative artist, in the classical sense, producing marble busts and drawings that look like something from a fairy tale. Over time, the scale would tip in favour of more pared down, streamlined constructs. This was in part, due to his joining the Abstraction-Création movement founded in Paris in 1931 by Auguste Herbin (1882-1960) and Georges Vantongerloo (1886-1965), and also, his befriending a clique of Rationalist architects in Milan known as Gruppo 7; who, like Melotti, had not entirely abandoned classical ideas, and were looking to find a “third way”, between the conservative spirit of accademismo, with its historicist obsessions, and the hard-edged modernism of the future, with its disdain for fundamental, diachronic norms. Interestingly, as a result of this friendship, the artist was inspired to branch out into furniture and product design — creating a series of extraordinary, experimental pieces, for e.g. candle holders, tables and mirrors from ceramic, brass and crystal. Their highly decorative aesthetic was considered somewhat provocative the time, as to actively advocate the use of decoration in modern design was truly to go against the grain.
A tentoni (1979) by Fausto Melotti © Fondazione Fausto Melotti, Milan
This extraordinary, unrelenting period of creativity came to a sudden and abrupt end with the outbreak of the Second Word War. In 1943 Melotti’s studio in Milan was bombed and much of his work destroyed. “I must confess that the war has caused me great inner pain and sickness,” he wrote. “One cannot make abstract art, one cannot even think about it, when the soul is full not of desperation, but of figures of desperation.” The pain, trauma and despair Melotti experienced first-hand would have a profound effect on his artistic vision, resulting in his “years of silence”, as he described them. The structured, mathematical order and harmony he applied to geometric abstraction no longer made sense in a world turned upside down by death and devastation, yet, despite his sense of “dislocation” and decision to take a break from sculptural activity, he explored alternative means of expression, for e.g. in 1944 he published a book of poetry, Il triste minotauro (“The sad minotaur”) and then, after 1945, his attention shifted to the craft and production of ceramics and terracotta — including his renowned “Teatrini” (Small Theaters), a genre intermediary between painting and sculpture. Rendered in chaotic polychromatic glazes, Melotti’s Teatrini offer a puppet-like quality, representing complete metaphysical worlds, enclosed within rectangular architectural structures and filled with fantastical objects and figures. Anchoring his postwar practice throughout the 1940s and 1950s, one of the first pieces executed from this body of work Teatrino (“Little Theatre”) (c. 1950) is an early example of his geometric schematization of the figure, whereas others, for e.g. Le mani (“The Hands”) (1949), expresses mystical, poetic tableaux that bring to mind the poetic boxed assemblages of American artist Joseph Cornell (1903-1972), which were created by the juxtaposition of commonplace objects.
By the 1960s Melotti had made a decisive return to sculpture, using an entirely new language built upon delicate threads and thin sheets of brass, iron, and gold. These new sculptures, expressing a more resolved and distinctly humanist sensibility, were described by writer Italo Calvino (1923-1985) as: “A score of weightless ideograms like water insects that seem to whirl on a brass structure screened by gauze thread.” Inspired by Calder (1898-1976) and Giacometti (1901-1966), Melotti, with constructivist clarity and poetic narrative power, created what he termed “anti-sculpture” — a series of elegant, skillfully constructed, almost dematerialised constructions of thin wire, soldered together and revealing themselves as three-dimensional drawings in space. His statement, “My activity is a game, and when it succeeds, it is poetry”, is characteristic of these delicately ramified sculptures, which, hard to define; occupy a mid-ground, somewhere between constructed minimalism and eloquent visual metaphors. Monumento ai perseguitati politici (“Monument to the Politically Persecuted”) (1962) is one of the artists few explicitly political works; a simple metal structure from which seven figures oscillate, swinging like the bodies of hanged men in an ill-fated moment of suffering, beneath the jagged edges of a burnished sun. The sculpture is a memorial, a poetically wrought elegy on death, cruelty and remembrance. Melotti’s 1973 work Il viaggio della luna (“Journey to the Moon”), is perhaps best demonstrative of this exuberant final phase — a delicate, ethereal construction of graphic gold shapes and fine wires. Something of a metaphysical dream world, to some extent it encapsulates Melotti’s artistic journey — a perfect balance between the two decisive disciplines of his work: music and the art of engineering, or rather, abstraction and narrative and geometry and representation. Melotti was an accomplished pianist and musical theorist, and the abstract nature of music can be traced in the lyricism and lightness of his work; one might even read his output during the 1960s and 1970s as three-dimensional renderings of avant-garde scores — even the titles of his sculptures include words such as “variations”, “sequence”, “counterpoint” and “scale”. The artist would even go as far as to describe these intricate brass creations as “a musical space structured in the building of harmony”.
The Warehouse of Ideas (1960) by Fausto Melotti © Fondazione Fausto Melotti, Milan
Aside from his sculptures, Melotti left behind a large oeuvre of drawings as well as ceramics, and of course, his teatrini; there was never one single artistic vocabulary, and instead, he switched between various styles and movements, genres, and even disciplines. Melotti’s work is so extraordinary, in that it opens a window onto the twentieth century, a fascinating period caught between classical culture and the birth of the avant-garde. Before the first world war, Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) had dominated and was revered by painters and sculptors alike, and it wasn’t until Pablo Picasso’s (1881-1973) audacious cage-like compositions of the 1920s (for e.g. the maquette Figure (1928) — a proposal for a monument to poet Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) — constructed from iron wire, thin metal rods and sheet metal) that there was a break from the tradition of modelling solid forms in space, thereby leading the way for the next generation of artists, which included Melotti, Calder and Fontana. Melotti integrated and combined elements from multiple artistic contexts, as part of a lifelong attempt to create a total artwork. Italian art critic and theorist Carlo Belli (1903-1991) writing in in Kn, a book-manifesto described by Kandinsky as being “the Gospel of abstract art”, said that the goal of total art was “to conclude, to sum up, to unleash some meaning from this half century of agitation” — an ambition which is perhaps perfectly embodied in Melotti’s white, nude, abstract sculptures. Informed by the languages of music and mathematics, as well as the flight of birds and the experience of melancholy, the artist’s work was infused not only with a sense of precision, but also with a spirit of poetry, playfulness and exuberance. Given the calibre of Melotti’s work, it is perhaps surprising that he is not as well-known as for e.g. Alberto Giacometti, who was born in the same year; the historical neglect is somewhat hard to fathom. American art critic Martin Filler (b. 1948) perhaps put it best when he characterized Melotti’s extraordinary oeuvre as a “theatre of life … in which the human form is reduced to its most elemental components in accordance with Modernism’s search for the essential and irreducible”.