"Words do not mean anything to me: they talk around the painting. What I want to express appears in the painting."
—Alberto BurriA defining example of Italian artist Alberto Burri’s iconoclastic practice, and a symbol of the radical experimentation of European post-war art, Sacco e Rosso is a work of exceptional harmony and poignancy, its textures and chromatic variances deeply evocative of the body and the trauma of the 20th century. Undoubtably Burri’s most prized works, the burlap Sacco e Rosso are exceptionally rare. Held in the same collection for over 30 years, the present Sacco e Rosso is one of only 15 such works in existence, one of which is held in the permanent collection of Tate Gallery in London. Emphasising its status as a defining piece of Italian post-war art, the work was once held in the personal collection of renowned art historian and Burri expert Cesare Brandi, and comes to auction with an extensive exhibition history having represented the Sacco e Rosso paintings on an international stage. Combining compositional simplicity and emotive power, Sacco e Rosso speaks lyrically to the incipient poetry residing in everyday objects, especially when combined with more expressive modes of abstraction starting to take shape contemporaneously.

 

War Wounds

 

Highly tactile, the repurposed burlap sacks used by Burri between 1950 and 1959 in the construction of these works are charged with profound lyricism and emotional intensity. Deeply connected both to the artist’s experiences as a medic during World War II, and of his internment in an American prisoner of war camp in 1943, Burri’s stitched, torn, and burnt Sacchi are transformed under the artist’s hand into powerful corporeal metaphors that still resonate today and would have been viscerally felt in their immediate post-war contexts.

 

A vital all-purpose material, burlap was used in the war effort in the construction of makeshift tents and camouflage, for the transportation of supplies and in the building of barricades on the front line. Like many other prisoners of war, Burri turned to art as a means of surviving the monotony and maltreatment of daily life, using whatever materials he found to hand. The ubiquitous burlap was quickly transformed under Burri’s treatment from inert material to a powerfully original medium, taking on added emotional weight when Burri returned to Naples in 1946 and understood the scale and impact of the destruction for the first time. Like the body on the battlefield, the city itself was blown apart, piles of dusty rubble and burnt out apartment blocks littering the streets, while the skeletal remains of bombed Renaissance churches tore at the sky.

 

 

Trained as a surgeon before the war and having seen action at Yugoslavia’s bloody front line in 1942, Burri had a practical understanding of the body’s vulnerability, and of the tactile qualities of flesh and tissue. Rough to the touch, the Sacchi ‘have open, grid-like weaves and rough and nubby surfaces that he worked up with a painterly facture through stitching, tearing, patching, and gluing’, the powerful use of vermillion in these distinguished Sacco e Rosso works anchoring the fabrics dematerialisation while accentuating ‘the recessions of wounds and craters’.ⁱ Capable of producing multiple associations and sensations at once thanks to ‘their real, not simulated textures’, the Sacchi spoke viscerally to the devasting physical reality of war on the body and materialised the deep emotional trauma of conflict in European collective memory of the 1950s.ⁱⁱ

"Burri transmutes rubbish into a metaphor for human, bleeding flesh. He vitalizes the dead materials in which he works, makes them live and bleed; then sews up the wounds evocatively and as sensuously as he made them […] He is an artist with a scalpel—the surgeon conscious of what lies within the flesh of his compositions and moved by it to the point that he can make the observer also sensitive to it."
—James Johnson SweeneyImmediately arresting, the present Sacco e Rosso unfolds in sweeping passages of deep black, raw burlap, and blood red as colour, form, and medium are perfectly synthesised in the composition. Riven with pockmarked wounds and burns, the coarse burlap gathers in elegant folds towards the upper portion of the canvas, abutting the red passage, its torn and frayed edges amplified in the contrast. Drawing attention to these areas, Burri engages the tactile qualities of his material in a forceful appeal to the senses, shifting our experience from a purely visual one to a primarily tactile and emotional one and introducing an ‘increased psychological intimacy between artwork and viewer’ⁱⁱⁱ Dominating the centre of the composition, the tear in the burlap here is especially evocative of this, immediately bringing to mind the theatricality of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio’s masterpiece The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, where looking alone is insufficient in eliciting feeling and empathy. As curator Emily Braun has suggested, while Caravaggio’s scene ‘enacts a narrative of touch’, Sacco e Rosso obliges ‘the viewer to probe the lacerations, whose depths are accentuated by the actual cast shadows.’^iv

 

A Matter of Materials

 

The careful balance of perceptual, tactile, and metaphoric elements used to such powerful effect in Sacco e Rosso can be traced through the radically experimental approach to materials taken by certain artists through the earlier years of the 20th century. Instrumental in establishing a formal language for Cubism, the papier collé of Braque and Picasso introduced the material of everyday life into their compositions, while Kurt Schwitters Merz assemblages radically challenged conventional definitions of art and demonstrated the poetic and visual potential incipient in discarded material. Artists as diverse as Paul Klee and Paul Gauguin had already explored the possibilities of using burlap as a ground, but it was Burri who fully exploited its metaphoric possibilities.

"In the sack I find a perfect compliance between tone, matter, and idea that can never be found in colour."
—Alberto Burri

A brief trip to Paris in 1947 shortly after his first solo exhibition with the Galleria La Margherita would prove decisive in solidifying some of his ideas around materials that he had already been developing in looking to Italian predecessors such as Enrico Prampolini. Amongst the Informel artists whose work he encountered for the first time on this trip, Jean Dubuffet - who incorporated soil, glass, gravel, and tar into his own compositions - would prove to be particularly instructive in validating Burri’s approach to materials and increasingly non-figurative work, the two artists sharing the understanding that ‘materials unusual in painting almost always accompany or narrate something else apart from themselves.’^v

 

Pushing materials to their extremes, Sacco e Rosso is an elegiac expression of the ineffable collective trauma keenly felt in those post-war years. Inflicting real damage onto his materials, it is deeply emblematic of both of the individual body and the scorched realities of a European post-war world. Nevertheless, within its scars and sutures, Sacco e Rosso carries itself with a quiet resilience and dignity equally evocative of the world from which it emerged. Ground-breaking at the time of its execution, in his Sacchi works Burri pioneered a highly personal style of Art Informel, and helped set the stage for Italy’s radical Arte Povera movement. Exhibited as early as 1952, Burri understood the significance of these works, and examples of his Sacchi are now held in the most eminent international institutions, including The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, and the Tate Gallery in London.

 

ⁱ Emily Braun & Carol Stringari, ‘Materials, Process, Colour: Sacchi’, in Alberto Burri: The Trauma of Painting, (exh. cat.), New York, 2005, p. 157. 
ⁱⁱ Emily Braun, Touch and Empathy’, in Alberto Burri: The Trauma of Painting, (exh. cat.), New York, 2005, p. 50
ⁱⁱⁱ Emily Braun, Touch and Empathy’, in Alberto Burri: The Trauma of Painting, (exh. cat.), New York, 2005, p. 50
^iv Emily Braun, Touch and Empathy’, in Alberto Burri: The Trauma of Painting, (exh. cat.), New York, 2005, p. 52. 
^v Bruno Corà, Alberto Burri: General Catalogue, Painting, 1945 – 1957, Volume 1, Perugia, 2015, p. 34.