Enrico Donati

Preface ENRICO DONATI, 1909–2008

A critical monograph on the work of Enrico Donati is long overdue. Spanning well over half a century, Donati’s artistic career was extraordinarily rich and he was associated with many of the most influential movements and groups of artists of the time, including Surrealism and the Abstract Expressionists. He also built up one of the great collections of American Indian, African, and Oceanic art. In order to cover the range of his work, his interests, and ideas, we decided early on that different voices should speak in this book—including that of Donati himself. In 1997 he talked with great verve about his life and work with his friend Ann Temkin, then curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and now the Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art. An edited version of the interview is published in this volume. Donati is best known for the objects he created in the context of Surrealism and for his collaborations with Marcel Duchamp. The fact is that he painted for more than six decades, but his paintings changed so radically over this time that he has never been identified with any one style. However, the consistency in his themes and his ideas, as differently as he may have expressed them, is striking. Our primary purpose here is to enlarge the understanding of his work as a whole and to open it up to further discussion. Many of his paintings were made with unusual materials, ones that are not always easy to identify, and so we invited a conservator to analyze a small group of these works, with some surprising results. I spent many days researching in the glorious studio Donati had worked in on Central Park South, but one of the most memorable days was in the company of the conservator, Cindy Albertson, with whom I explored the stores of the artist’s materials and the strange collection of implements with which he manipulate them. The choice of four paintings to scrutinize and test was made with an eye to understanding the development of his diverse mediums and techniques, from his first experiments in going beyond oil paint to his canvases with surfaces of great complexity.

Composition, 1945. Oil on canvas, 25 x 30 in. Private collection

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Le Roi de mangragore (The mandrake king), 1945. Oil on canvas, 36 x 30 in. Private collection

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La Prière (The prayer), 1947. Oil on canvas, 30 x 25 in. Private collection

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Multiplication en bleu creation du mâle (Multiplication in blue, creation of the male), 1947. Mixed media on canvas, 40 x 30 in. Private collection

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Bloodstone, 1961. Acrylic, ground quartz, and dry pigment on canvas, 553⁄16 x 723⁄16 in. Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin; Gift of Mari and James A. Michener, 1991. Photo: Rick Hall

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Inscription, 4026 BC, 1962. Oil and sand on canvas, 60 x 50 in. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A; Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Gilbert W. Kahn, Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY

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Drawing with hieroglyphics and rock studies, c. 1976. Ink with colored pencil on paper, 15½ x 11¾ in. Private collection

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Drawing with studies of stones, c. 1976. Ink with colored pencil on paper, 10 x 8 in. Private collection

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Temple deco, 1994–95. Mixed media on canvas, Private collection. Photo: Jeffrey Sturges

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Station de départ pour exploration au dela du néon (Departure station for exploration of neon), 1995. Mixed media on canvas, 30 x 24 in. Private collection

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