Alberto Magnelli at Leonard Hutton - Brief Article

Art in America, Sept, 1999 by David Ebony

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

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 over art books and journals to familiarize himself with modern as well as historical works. Having befriended key Futurists including Marinetti, Boccioni and Carra, he was exposed to the ideas of Italy's avant-garde. Magnelli's earliest paintings on view, The White Table (1913) and The Losing Jockey (1914), reflect a careful study of Fauvist and Cubist experiments, while his large, exuberant, figurative works of the following years have a Futurist flavor.

Magnelli's mature style emerged in 1931, after a visit to the Carrara marble quarries prompted a move to pure abstraction. Working in Paris, he produced some 50 paintings depicting cut-rock shapes; the series became the foundation on which most of the artist's subsequent work would be based. A major canvas, Pierres No. 7 (Rocks #7), and two drawings from the series (all from 1933) were on display. In the elegant grisaille canvas, overlapping planes and interlocking architectonic forms seem 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 his friend Le Corbusier. Perhaps the most fascinating works on view reflect Magnelli's interaction with the Surrealists in the mid- to late 1930s. Active Phantoms (1938), for instance, is an example of his imaginative fusion of Surrealist fantasy with the rigors of Purism. In this canvas, two elongated red forklike shapes set against a brilliant yellow ground suggest abstracted figures. They seem to fly over an arrangement of gray bands like gymnasts leaping over a set of fractured parallel bars.

During the war, Magnelli and his wife, Susi Gerson, fled Paris and settled in Plan-de-Grasse in the south of France. Due to the wartime scarcity of paint and canvas, he concentrated on drawing and poetry. However, immediately after the war he returned to Paris, where he quickly resumed painting. The show concluded with the canvases Rampart No. 1 (1958) and Variations No. 4 (1959), resplendent examples of the late works in which Magnelli refined the peculiar, shallow space and distinctive vocabulary of sleek, geometric forms to which he devoted the rest of his life.