Italian born Enrico Donati, one of the last great American Surrealist painters, had a long fascination with surface and texture that included mixing his paint with sand, dust, coffee grounds and, at times, the contents of his vacuum cleaner, which he mixed with pigment and glue and slathered on his canvas. Bearing strong similarities in stylistic preferences to the work of Bernard Dubuffet, Donati was an integral part of the mélange of expatriate and American artists at the center of the post war New York art scene, having been introduced by the writer and "Father of Surrealism" André Breton to the likes of Ashile Gorky, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Salvador Dali, Yves Tanguy, Giorgio de Chirico, Fernand Léger and the American sculptor Alexander Calder. Duchamp became a particular friend of Donati. They collaborated on various projects, including the Exposition Internationale du Surrealisme at the Maeght Gallery in Paris in 1947. They devised the exposition's program, decorating the cover of each copy with a foam rubber breast. Donati continued to transform his work throughout the course of his six decades long career. Donati would go on to embrace the Abstract Expressionist movement and exhibited with such major figures of the New York School as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning.
The date is 1951 and an intriguing question is - what date do artists begin to venture into the realm and subject of the color black. Donati comes out of the Surrealist realm of creating works full of content and then makes a sharp turn to explore space through texture on the canvas. Donati begins by using a combination of pigment, glue and heavy sand, so heavy the painting becomes a sculpture. Incorporating the subtle thin lines of white that act like light introduces both composition and a sense of mystery into the canvas.
This work by Donati is minimalist, inviting the viewer to contemplate what is void, what is suggested, what are boundaries and what is infinite. The two white lines are specifically intriguing and Black and 2 White’s speaks also to an archaeological origin. Black and 2 White speaks of this new adventure and of the artist’s quest to combine image, matter and medium to produce a world in which the echoes of primeval and prehistoric representations suggest the artist’s lifelong interest in the passage from life, through death, and then into life again.
It is noted that around this time Donati created a series of works called the Moonlight series. These Moonscapes, as Marcel Duchamp named the new series, seem to overlap with the timeline of our Black and 2 White. It is also interesting to note that at the time of this work Donati began to associate with the New York Abstract Expressionists and these works are tied to that relationship. However, his works, such as this one, is not action painting and not in line with the aesthetics of exactly what they were doing. Yet, the visual aspect of works such as this one were so strong, Donati was signed by the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York. Along with the other prominent artist of the time, such as Pollack, Rothko, Barnett Newman, Richard Pousette-Dart, and Theodoros Stamos, all founding members and leading lights of the New York School, Donati’s Moonscape series was exhibited at the Parsons gallery, the Stable, and the Guggenheim Museum, taking many by surprise.