Skip to main content
Filter artworksArtworks
Close

Select a category:

  • Painting
  • Sculpture
  • Photography
  • Works on paper
Filter by keyword
Width range
- inches
Height range
- inches
Filters

Date

Edition

Medium

Nationality

Style

Price range
$
-
$
19th, 20th, 21st Century Art
Taylor Graham
American and European Art
Search submit
Wishlist
0

Enquiry list

This artwork has been saved in your enquiry list. You can either review your list and make an enquiry, or continue to browse and find other artworks.
View enquiry list
Continue browsing
Menu
  • Menu
  • Home
  • About
  • Paintings
  • Sculpture
  • Photography
  • Artists
  • Exhibitions
  • Notable sales
  • Transport
  • Corporate art
  • Contact

Paintings

Untitled
Untitled
Untitled, 1968
Enrico Donati
Oil and sand on canvas
12 x 9 inches
Framed: 12 1/2 x 9 1/2 inches
Signed indistinctly, dated, and dedicated verso: 16.3.68 / To Barbara / Mit Freundlich-keit-amicizia
Add to enquiry list
Remove from wishlist
Share
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Pinterest
  • Tumblr
  • Email
Previous
|
Next
209 
of 461
artist Description provenance

artist

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.

 

Description

In its geode-like form, Untitled resembles a treasure from a lost civilization. Donati derived artistic inspiration from a fossil he once found on a beach and cracked open; thus, his Fossil Series was born. He developed a marked tendency toward simple, rigidly frontal compositions featuring two or three richly colored, sand-textured geometric forms of vaguely geological or archaeological origin. Some of these forms were plain, others were incised with what appeared to be ancient, partially eroded inscriptions, and others revealed what might be fossil fragments. With these simple, blatantly physical, and provocatively iconic images of mysterious and indeterminate ancestry, Donati finally and fully came into his own. The Fossil Series occupied Donati for the greater part of the 1960s, and he exhibited these works to critical acclaim at the Staempfli Gallery. Historian Theodore F. Wolff has documented Donati's theoretical statements on what would become his seminal body of work:

 

"Once again, I was in touch with the cycle of creation, destruction, and rebirth." Holding the halves of the stone in his hands, he understood finally the depth of the fossil's hold on him, and that it "had always been my true myth and metaphor, my guide from the very beginning of my career." Impelled to put his thoughts into more concrete form, he wrote: "There is a Latin word 'incubus' which I roughly describe in terms of a hammer which keeps tapping at your head… You become aware of the knock but not of its significance. In order to find the source you must connect and relate various clues and fleeting insights. My incubus developed from a fossil… The fossil has an incredibly animated inside form… and carries the whole cycle of creation within it. Nature has destroyed the life it once was and has reincarnated it in a new life that will have perpetual existence … To me, the fossil contains within itself all the mystery, power and indestructibility of life."

—Theodore F. Wolff

 

provenance

Private Collection, New York, NY

This website uses cookies
This site uses cookies to help make it more useful to you. Please contact us to find out more about our Cookie Policy.

Manage cookies
Accept

Cookie preferences

Check the boxes for the cookie categories you allow our site to use

Cookie options
Required for the website to function and cannot be disabled.
Improve your experience on the website by storing choices you make about how it should function.
Allow us to collect anonymous usage data in order to improve the experience on our website.
Allow us to identify our visitors so that we can offer personalised, targeted marketing.
Save preferences

New York

5 East 82nd Street

New York, NY 10028

 

203.216.3088

646.422.7884

 

Monday - Friday

9am - 5pm

And by Appointment

GREENWICH

80 Greenwich Avenue

Greenwich, CT 06830

 

203.216.3088

203.489.3163

 

Tuesday – Saturday

10am – 5pm

PORT CHESTER

168 Irving Avenue

Suite 301B

Port Chester, NY 10573

 

914.937.2070

 

By Appointment

Send an email
Instagram, opens in a new tab.
Artsy, opens in a new tab.
Copyright © 2022 Taylor Graham
Site by Artlogic
Cookie policy

NEW YORK

5 East 82nd Street, New York, NY 10028 203.216.3088 - 646.422.7884 info@taylorandgraham.com
Monday - Friday, 9am - 5pm and by Appointment

PORT CHESTER

168 Irving Avenue, Suite 301B Port Chester, NY 10573 914.937.2070
By Appointment

GREENWICH

80 Greenwich Avenue Greenwich, CT 06830 203.489.3136 – 203.216.3088 info@taylorandgraham.com
Tuesday - Saturday 10am - 5pm