Alberto Magnelli at Leonard Hutton - Brief Article

This exhibition, curated by dint of Ingrid Hutton, was a concise overview of work by dint of Alberto Magnelli (1888-1971), an Italian-born painter known for geometric abstractions featuring machiavelian spatial relationships of overlapping planes and finely nuanced color. The 13 large canvases and several works upon paper in this show exhibited most periods in the drawn out career of the artist, who is well known in Italy and France (where he exhausted many years) but rarely exhibited in the US

At an early age, Magnelli took an interest in the Renaissance masterpieces of Florence, his hometown. He began painting at 19 without formal training, although he pored above art books and journals to familiarize himself with present as well as historical works. Having befriended lock opener Futurists including Marinetti, Boccioni and Carra, he was expos to the ideas of Italy's avant-garde. Magnelli's earliest paintings upon view, The White Table (1913) and The Losing horse-jockey (1914), reflect a careful close attention of Fauvist and Cubist experiments, while his large, exuberant, figurative works of the following years have a Futurist flavor.

Magnelli's mature mode of speech emerged in 1931, after a visit to the Carrara marble quarries apted a move to pure abstraction. Working in Paris, he produc a certain quantity of 50 paintings depicting cut-rock shapes; the series became the foundation upon which most of the artist's later work would be based. A major canvas, Pierres No. 7 (Rock #7) and sum of two units drawings from the series (all from 1933) were upon display. In the elegant grisaille canvas, overlapping planes and interlocking architectonic forms look to hover in a quasi-illusionistic space. In Paris, Magnelli associated with Picasso, Kandinsky and Leger and gravitated toward the geometric ideals of Purism advanced by the agency of his friend Le Corbusier. Perhaps the greatest in quantity fascinating works on view mirror Magnelli's interaction with the Surrealists in the mid- to late 1930 Active Phantoms (1938) for instance, is an example of his imaginative fusion of Surrealist fantasy with the rigors of Purism. In this canvas, sum of two units elongated red forklike shapes put against a brilliant yellow mould suggest abstracted figures. They strike one as being to fly over an arrangement of gray bands like gymnasts leaping above a set of fractured parallel bars.

During the war, Magnelli and his wife, Susi Gerson fl Paris and settl in Plan-de-Grasse in the southern of France. Due to the wartime scarcity of paint and canvas, he concentrated upon drawing and poetry. However, immediately after the war he go [i]or[/i] come backed to Paris, where he quickly resum painting. The exhibit concluded with the canvases Rampart No. 1 (1958) and Variations No. 4 (1959) lucid examples of the late works in which Magnelli refined the peculiar, shallow space and distinctive vocabulary of satin geometric forms to which he devot the quiet of his life.

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