Menil Drawing Institute’s ‘Silent Revolutions’ is a revelation
As rewarding as it can be to see familiar, iconic artworks in museums, discovering a piece or an artist for the first time is thrilling — and even better when it opens windows into new galaxies.
I had that sense throughout “Silent Revolutions” at the Menil Drawing Institute, which for me became “silent revelations.”
Italian drawings of the 20th century were not exactly top of mind. Now, 70 works on paper from Milan’s Collezione Ramo have stimulated some mental real estate I didn’t know was idle. (The institute’s marvelously odd 18th- and 19th-century drawings by the obscure French architect Jean-Jacques Lequeu last year did that, too.)
Save for Umberto Boccioni, Lucio Fontana and Jannis Kounellis and the movements with which they are associated, Italian 20th-century art is not well known in America. Their drawings are even less familiar. The late Italian collector Pino Rabolini, founder of the Italian jewelry company Pomellato, amassed 600 drawings before his death in 2018 with the aim of illuminating that history. MDI chief curator Edouard Kopp collaborated with Collezione Ramo curator Irina Zucca Alessandrelli to create the first survey in the U.S. devoted to the subject.
“It was an area where we could make a difference,” Kopp said as he walked me through the gallery. He has hung the show in loose chronological order and divided the space into four evenly sized rooms. Three illustrate how drawings fed the widely influential movements of Futurism, Spatialism and Arte Povera. One room singles out spectacular drawings by women because, well, in the 21st century that is an important thing to do. A few works also highlight connections with art in America.
In the West, it was Renaissance Italians who first thought about the nature of drawing, introducing the concept of disegno to refer to both the mental process of conception and the practical, mechanical aspects, Kopp noted. “So from the 16th century onward, the idea of drawing as articulated in Italy had really wide influence.”
Kopp said he did not dive into the Collezione Ramo with a preconceived theme. “What struck me is how innovative the times were in the field … The core is this idea of conceptual versus practical. Some artists were interested in one or the other, but some were interested in both — how the idea of drawing can be pushed and how the materials can help you do that.”
Exploring those boundaries also is what Houston’s institute is all about.
First, Futurism
“When people think of Italian art, they think of antiquity before Italy existed, or the Renaissance; but the 20th century was rich with a dizzying sense of creativity and innovation and, indeed, revolutions,” Kopp said. “You could say the visual art starts with a graphic line in 1909, when the poet Filippo Marinetti wrote the manifesto of Futurism, which then inspired a number of major artists.”
The show’s first gallery quietly captures the forward momentum those radically utopian Futurists
sought, featuring drawings that expressed their vision of modernity more than their Fascist political leanings. “Futurists are obsessed with everything that goes fast, including motorcyles, cars and above all, airplanes,” Kopp said.
Many of the drawings dynamically compress visions of things that move, from bicyclists to urban street scenes to the more conceptual realm of the vortex. Fortunato Depero’s untitled study for “Nitrito in velocita,” which led to an exquisite painting for the 1932 Venice Biennale, envisions a horse and its rider as a machinelike assemblage made of curved metal. It’s a marvel of simplified forms with an angular, torqued composition as well as a masterful rendering of tones. (The grid Depero used to transfer the image to canvas is visible, too.)
Adolfo Wildt’s “Animantium Rex Homo” stands out for other reasons. He was among artists who riffed on classicism rather than abandoning it to move forward. From a biblical series by Wildt, Italy’s most prominent early-20th-century sculptor, the drawing is dominated by a hyperstylized Creator figure set against a graphically stark background that gives it a slightly abstracted atmosphere, with humans and animals who look like they could be collaged onto the paper (they are not).
The splendid, shadowy girl of Umberto Boccioni’s “Controluce (Into the Light)” is a smaller but perhaps more historically significant eye catcher. Made in 1910, it is the oldest work in the show. The light that penetrates the subject’s face through the window behind her would become a signature of Boccioni’s Futurism. “It was made just before he joined the Futurist group, but you can already see the type of imagery he will pursue … how planes emerge,” Kopp explained. “This is a typical interest of the Futurists, that optics play tricks.” The subject’s dour expression adds to the drawing’s power.
Emotion surfaces on other walls in purely geometric forms, especially Manlio Rho’s “Untitled (Composition)” from 1937. Its block forms hint at the kind of rigor Russian Supremacists were exploring, “but he paints color with so much sentiment,” Kopp suggested. “The brushwork has a painterly quality.”
Spatialism
Fontana, who was trained by Wildt, may be familiar for his slashed canvases that invoke art made both in and through space — the style he christened in 1957 as Spatialism. The works in this show are from the early 1950s, hinting at the lead-up as he attacked absorbent paper surfaces by poking snaking lines of tiny dots in them.
“He invites the third dimension into the two dimensions of the sheet,” Kopp explained. He’s especially keen on a sheet of small sketches from1953 for what they tell him about Fontana’s process. “Some of these compositions belong to Art Informel, the European partner to Abstract Expressionism. But what I love is that you have a main motif that is very free and gestural, and then these little dots appear that could become punctures or slashes eventually,” he said. “Even though he valued spontaneity greatly, he prepared himself.”
For Alberto Burri, another master of the 1950s, materials were were a tool for change. Responding to the devastation of World War II, he built up and partly destroyed works using fire as a medium. His “Combusion” drawings are quite rare, for obvious reasons — “when you attack thingswith a flame, they tend to burn up,” Kopp said. The one in “Silent Revolutions” exerts raw, textural power. You must see it in person to fully appreciate the layers of paint, glue and char. (Less poetically, it reminds me at first glance of a troubling colonoscopy image.)
Enrico Castellani, who trained in Brussels and was influenced by Piet Mondrian, took a more rational approach. An exquisite paper relief from 1974 shows his extremely calculated drawing style, which could also be defined as etching: It’s a perfect, intricate grid — both concave and convex — formed by pressing wooden molds with embedded nails into paper.
Arte Povera and beyond
As the century careened into its later half, movements were less defined. Things feel more expansive in the show’s other two rooms, in part because they hold fewer but larger works. The Arte Povera movement was loose, Kopp noted, and founded by a critic who recognized a trend in the late 1960s toward work made with humble materials. But other concerns surfaced, too.
Ideas about language and the mark-making of writing became crucial. Artists also began to challenge viewers as participants in their process — that idea, common now, that a piece is not finished until a viewer has interpreted it or reacted with it in some way.
For pure graphical oomph, Alighiero Boetti’s drawing of a microphone and a keyboard is one of the showstoppers, with its clean-lined, pure elements shown from two different angles. Jannis Kounellis’ “Untitled (7-44)” is from a well-known series that transforms letters, numbers and other signs into the artist’s own, opaque linguistic system. A Mario Merz drawing combines ideas about the mathematical Fibonacci sequence, rowing and poetry.
Carol Rama was a force of her own, never part of the major groups but well known for erotic works that were explosive in terms of color, line and subject matter. This show’s two untitled works suggest more restraint. Bold and beautifully paired — one dark, one light — they include a mixed-media piece made with a bicycle inner tube, leatherette and colored pencil on black cardboard paper; and a squidlike, bomb-inspired composition of ink, enamel and felt pen on paper, embellished with taxidermic eyes.
Strong women
Most of the works in the show’s final section are enticingly delicate, meditative, mysterious and lyrical.
There’s a sense of infinity: Dadamaino composed the landscape “Alphabet of the Mind” with countless small marks. Betty Danon makes the visible somewhat invisible with indecipherable drawings under translucent layers of tracing paper that look like ephemeral scores.
Maria Lai’s “Diary,” written with thread that runs off the pages in tangles, turns incomprehension into its own kind of achingly good poetry.
Irma Blank’s large watercolors reflect the beauty of existence literally through the artist’s breath. Her so-called Radical Writings are not writings in any traditional sense, Kopp explained. “She tries to create these pre-linguistic signs and works at night, drawing by controlling her breathing very intensely. She likes to apply paint in one breath, so the works are chronicles of the body in time and space.”
My body, in that space, was quite satisfied.