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TEFAF MAASTRICHT 2024
9 - 14 March 2024
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TEFAF MAASTRICHT 2024

PAST exhibition
Bortolo Sacchi, Coro (Chorus), 1932

Bortolo Sacchi (Venice, 1892-Bassano del Grappa, 1978)

Coro (Chorus), 1932
Tempera on cardboard
73 × 103 cm
88 x 118 x 3 cm (with the frame)
On the back of the stretcher: printed label of the 18th Venice Biennale with the number 21; another label of the Biennale with autograph indications of the name and surname, title (‘Coro’), price (‘10,000 lire’), owner (‘the artist’) and address (‘Campo S. Andrea 468 in Venice’)
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Exhibitions

18ª edizione della Biennale Internazionale di Venezia, 1932; Palazzo Bonaguro, Bortolo Sacchi (1892-1978). Dipinti, disegni, ceramiche, curated by Mario Guderzo, Bassano del Grappa, 1 October – 3 December 2000.

 

Literature

Biennale di Venezia, 1932, p. 83 n. 17, tav. 51 (Il coro); Biancale 1932, pp. 151 fig. 152; Francini 1932; Munari 1972, pp. 17-19, 53 tav. 22; catalog of the exhibition at Palazzo Bonaguro, Bassano del Grappa, 2000, pag. 134 fig. 52.

 

By the early 1930s, Sacchi’s poetics had reached a peak, and in the “stones” of Venice he recognized his main source of inspiration. In this painting the artist seems to have taken up, freely transfiguring it, an insight of the 19th-century Venetian painter Antonio Zona who, in Un Canto Funebre (1862, Turin, GAM) – a work which enjoyed considerable fortune – had proposed a choir of women and girls in the foreground against the background of a bridge in Venice, while in this case a slow and solemn funeral procession is taking place.
By bringing the bridge with its characteristic masks to the fore and superimposing above it the faces of girls depicted while singing, Sacchi has skewed any realistic suggestion to instead propose a vaguely surreal juxtaposition between the faces suspended in the void and the deformed yet harmonious stone masks which match and unite with the “chorus” – a montage that allowed the artist to unveil his caricatural-surreal vein and to attune it to a rather neglected aspect of Venetian life, namely, the keystones which dot the doorframes of the palazzi and decorate some Venetian bridges, in particular the Ponte delle Guglie, but also that of San Polo (depicted by Sacchi in Davanti al Ponte, cat. of Paintings No. 53). The stone masks – old fawns, canine and leonine protomes – are allowed, between the whimsical, clever and joking, to sing a chorus along with these innocent-looking girls with their seraphic faces, while from below the bridge appears a dove in flight, perhaps a symbol of the pact made. In a painting like this, with its palpable programmatic intent, it must be emphasized that the notion of innocence which makes even the most deformed stones sing – corresponds to a twofold pictorial treatment, referable to two very precise moments of the artist’s evolution: on the one hand, the girls’ faces in profile, with the emphasis on the contours and flat planes, a kind of self-expression from previous works and attributable to a taste shared with Cadorin in the twenties; on the other, the quirky and tonally dramatic painting of the masks, the sign of a recent evolution and a stylistic constant for many years to come. In the same period, around 1930, Sacchi conceived the La Visitazione (cat. of Paintings No. 31) in which the heads of the two women have been cut, metaphysically, at the height of the neck and placed in the foreground, confirming the presence of an effective metonymic approach even in the early thirties.

 

A good opportunity to confirm the way our artist took a distance from his painter peers, coming more into line with Magic Realism, is offered by the painting Il Coro a Tre Voci by Gianfilippo Usellini (Milan, Museo del Novecento), a work dated 1931, and exhibited at the Brera in 1932. The negative reaction of the critics at the time (Francini 1932) is significant of the difficulty that Sacchi’s language encountered due to its originality.

 

- Nico Stringa

 


 

Text taken from the catalogue of the exhibition held at Palazzo Bonaguro, Bortolo Sacchi (1892-1978). Dipinti, Disegni, Ceramiche, curated by Mario Guderzo, Bassano del Grappa, October – December 2000, p. 134 fig. 52

 

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