Saturday, June 9, 2007

Influence And Context; VanGogh And The Emigre



If we cast our gaze momentarily on the art world of Australia in the 1950s we encounter an avid cast of painterly myth-makers: Boyd, Perceval, Nolan, Tucker, Gleeson, Olsen, Vassilieff, Fairweather; these are Australia’s official ‘modernist’ canon. What unites these artists most, in retrospect, is the almost anarchic temperement of their painting; oil pant flickered and flew, scumbled, dribbled and encased itself onto their canvases. The pictorial mood was essentially expressionist, and resonant with strong social concerns.
Martich - Severi’s paintings of the 1940s are not far removed from this creative ethos. Looking at his Jug With Flowers from 1947, one is immediately reminded of John Perceval’s intensely rhythmic canvases. The common element here is a love of Van Gogh. The Dutch Master had a profound impact on the emigre from Fiume, as he did on many of his Australian contempories. The influence can still be felt in Baccanti and re - emerges as late as 1965 in the painterly abstraction of works in vitreous enamel.
Perhaps if Martich -Severi had continued in this vein he may have been embraced and celebrated by his adopted homeland, just as Dannilla Vassilief and Leon Kossoff had been. His essentially graphic aesthetic spirit, however, as revealed by these drawings for sculpture, was leading him in a new direction; one closer in heart to his Italian lineage.This lineage gained its power and grace from its graphic release and formal restraint.
There is a highly developed sense of tension in Itallian art, a legacy of the ancient Hellenes, which Martich-Severi certainly inherited. He became, then, an anomoly in the Australian painting landscape. A new nation attempting to forge its myths and identity would have difficulty accepting into its story the metaphysical flowering of an art from another nation.


Text: copyright: James Waller, 2007. Image: Jug With Flowers, 1947 copyright: Serge Martich Osterman.

Sculptural Essence of Line: Early 1950s

Martich-Severi’s development was truly sustained and never deviated from the aesthetic logic which dwelt and grew within him. Whilst this language found most complete expression in the small scale biro and felt pen forms, its energy flowed naturally into three dimensional ideas. An undated folio of drawings, called Bosbelli Sculpture Drawing Folio, reveals the importance of line to the development of the artist’s sculpture. We may guess these drawings to be from the early 1950s, given their similarity to a composition in ink from 1952, entitled Baccanti, and the logic that they must pre-date certain sculptures. The link to Baccanti, to drawings of the late 1940s, and compositions in the late 1950s endows the Bosbelli studies with a dual significance; they inform and give clues to both the artist’s three dimensional and two dimensional language. Hence this discussion deals with them in relation to both developments, whilst a comparitive study of Martich - Severi’s entire corpus of sculpture is discussed later on.
As works of art in themselves, the Bosbelli studies impart a deep tenderness and sensuality. They also provide us with a rare glimpse into the initial stages of creative thought. Here we find the artist in a state which is truly light, free, and emotionally resonant.
Due to many factors, not the least of which were financial, Martich-Severi realized very few sculptural projects. The principle exceptions were Adam, Eve , and Diana, the formal seeds of which may be found in these studies. Adam, Eve and Dianna, realized in 1965 and 1963 respectively, were conceived as drawings in 1951. The drawings hold a very similar feeling and rhythm to the Bosbelli studies, strengthening the previously estimated date of the latter.
Thematically the Bosbelli studies and Baccanti belong to a tradition of arcadian celebration of love, dance, and music. Whilst the formal qualities of Constantin Brancusi and Jean Arp come to mind, it is the spirit of August Rodin and Henri Matisse which resonates in kinship with these works.
A monograph of drawings, printed in 1974 confirms the date of the Bosbelli studies to 1951. The works reproduced in pgs 20 and 21 of the monograph includes Amanti in Vollo, a drawing included in the Bosbelli sculpture folio. The other works on these pages, have unfortunately not as yet come to light. Like the Bosbelli studies already mentioned, these works are a deeply beautiful expression of sensuality, love, and music.


Baccanti painted in ink in 1952 holds a special spiritual resonance in Martich-Severi’s oeuvre. Like in his drawing studies, the veil of artifice is truly lifted in this beautiful, unassuming work. The forms speak, without hardly seeming to be there. There is the feeling of an ancient carnival, of timeless music; it is another world which awakens a distant memory within the viewer. One thinks of a pagan festival situated in no time or place; forever suspended on the horizon of our knowing. The Discovery of Music holds a deep affinity with Baccanti, suspended as it seems in that same distant festival. There is an aching melancholy present here, a feeling of profound pathos which would haunt the chain song of Martich Severi’s future biros.
The theme of music is one which is naturally manifest throughout the oeuvre. One thinks of the dark and brooding self portrait of 1948, and the oil ‘fugues’ also of the1940s; these are direct references which convey the artist’s instinctive affinity. The analogy runs as deeply as the visual investigation. The Discovery of Music and Baccanti do not dwell on the surface; they delve, rather, into the mystery of cognitive awakening, the moment of discovery of a deeper world.
The awakening of love is perhaps the most richly celebrated theme in all traditions and art forms. The tender convergence of arcs in the Bosbelli studies reveals a unique and sophistiacated modernist enrichment of this ageless story. In feeling one thinks of Chagall’s gravity - defying lovers and Matisse’s amorous ballads of line which celebrate the poems of Stephanne Mallarme.
A fine artist, like a fine poet, may elicit much with an extreme economy of means. This is especially true of Martich-Severi, whose oeuvre is an exemplary example of humble material turned into gold. Baccanti exists, with other compositions of the early 1950s, as a bridge to a new aesthetic understanding which began to evolve in the artist’s work in the latter part of the decade.

Thursday, June 7, 2007

Introduction

*
On the occasion of the fifth Venetian exhibition of Icilio Martich - Severi, Dr. Vincenzo Aurigemma wrote in the introduction to the catalogue, the following words:
"This continuous search is doubtless one of the characteristics of the artist’s inner being. A constant factor in his work as an artist - a joy and also a burden for him - is the invention of ever new ‘modes’ of expression."
Fifteen years later, the artist James Gleeson wrote a dismissive review, criticizing Martich - Severi’s plethora of styles, and proclaiming that ‘none of them work’.
Icilio Martich - Severi is at the time of writing virtually unknown to the wider Australian public. The words of Dr. Aurgemma, written in 1950, touches one of the core reasons. When the artist and critic, James Gleeson, dismissed Martich - Severi in 1965 as ‘an artist in search of a style’ , he not only completely misunderstood the work of the artist from Fiume, he also dealt a serious blow to his career.
It is with a sense of necessity and privilege that I have set about the task of this book. As the first in depth study and catalogue of Martich - Severi’s entire oeuvre, I believe it reveals a Modernist Master; every bit a flower of the Italian tradition as Justin Obrien., only more so for he extended its formal and spiritual language. Consequently it must also show an artist of deep significance to Australia’s cultural vibration; its visual language, awareness, and understanding.
Throughout his catalogue introduction, Dr. Aurigemma touches upon aspects of Martich - Severi’s creative spirit, in a way which is almost prophetic. The two following excerpts are fundamental to any retrospective analysis of this artist’s work:
"Severi is constantly engaged in an effort to free himself from reality. This effort, at times stormy and at times serene, has progressively transformed his vision of things till nothing is left of them but movement and colour.
...as an artist he was immune - pardon me - untouched by the influence of schools and academies, and freely followed his own natural impulse; a necessity, now, in his search for the coloured forms in the depth of his being..."
The ‘stormy and serene’ qualities are prevalent as a presiding duality throughout Martich - Severi’s oeuvre. Their mature manifestation lies within the dual development of his corpus of compositions in biro, and his ‘colour song’ of compositions created in felt pen. The former is perhaps the most sustained chain song of pathos and dance in Western art; whereas the latter reaches states of complete inner transparency and balance. The ‘search for the coloured forms in the depths of his being’ relates inimically to this state of inner balance.
The spirit of an artist is a vibrational mystery; the artist’s life a continual answer to its call. Somewhere between the call of the vibration and the answer of the artist’s life dwells his or her most blessed purpose. Martich - Severi answered with ardent passion to his calling. Love, dance, music, becoming, departing into Timeless Space; these are the themes which dwell in his answer, and the forms it took graze the very soul of our human longing.
Ceramics, sculpture, oil paintings, works in felt pen and biro, vitreous enamel, fibre glass, acrylic, metal leaf, charcoal, pastel, ink, monoprint, watercolour, and lithography. In unearthing the artist’s archives I came to expect the unexpected and still met with surprise! As with Picasso, it is Martich - Severi’s spirit of line which energises and unites all of his endeavours. He himself asserted as much in a drawing monagraph printed in 1974:
"DRAWING is, was and will be the basis of any sort of visual art...drawings are the most free, spontaneous, direct expression of the artist. In the drawing you have the real original idea. Later you have to work, to feel, to put all the skill in but the creative act is done."
Consequently, in putting this catalogue together, as much attention has been paid to drawing studies as to the most highly realized compositions. Often the boundary is blurred, as with the corpus of compositions in biro; whilst they reach varying degrees of ‘completion’, the sparest works hold a pictorial integrity comparable to that of Paul Cezanne. Martich - Severi’s oeuvre challenges, as many have done in the twentieth century, the traditional hierarchy of the plastic arts in western visual culture. His masterpiece of 1976 is a composition executed in biro on canvas. What a wonderful inversion of the status quo! I have tended throughout this text to use the term ‘composition’ rather than ‘drawing’ due to the very ambiguity this intimates. The main exception has been in referring to studies for sculptures, where the pictorial idea is intended for another form.
Martich - Severi’s preference throughout his life was for retrospective exhibitions; exhibitions which included a rich variety of forms and mediums, from different periods, viewed side by side. A catalogue is also an exhibition of sorts, and in ‘curating’ it I have found it necessary to do the exact opposite. The principle reason for this is so that we may gain a sense of a clear aesthetic development, and for the visual joy of seeing an unabridged revelation of form.
The most fitting words of introduction to this artist’s oeuvre are from Martich-Severi himself. I quote here from his drawing monograph printed in 1974:
"Altogether I am happy that Art exists, I am grateful to the artists past and present who gave me so much enjoyment, and I hope to give you some enjoyment myself."

text, copyright: James Waller 2007. Image, copyright: Serge Martich Osterman