(Florence 1888–1971 Meudon)
Untitled (Danseuse-Marionette), c. 1913-1914, oil on canvas, 60 x 30 cm, framed

We are grateful to Daniel Abadie for confirming the authenticity of this work, which will be included in the catalogue raisonné, currently being prepared.

Provenance:
Ridolfo Peruzzi de’Medici Collection, Florence (acquired directly from the artist)
European Private Collection

“All depends on our ability to see and the way we see things.
We can be thrilled with excitement or not. Our ability to put together all that is necessary to give shape and form to our realisations is the result of protracted study and efforts. One cannot build with nothing. And it takes its time.”
Alberto Magnelli

Alberto Magnelli: Untitled (Danseuse-Marionette),
An important discovery from a prestigious Private Collection

Produced between 1913 and 1914, a crucial phase in Magnelli’s transition towards abstraction, this painting comes from the Florentine body of works which belonged to the Marquis Ridolfo Peruzzi de’ Medici, with whom the painter had an intense friendship and a period of constant interaction between 1913 and 1915.
The painting is defined by a grid of coloured planes within which lies a female nude, rendered in an artificial manner but still formally recognisable. The overall grid is based on the use of straight lines parallel or perpendicular to one another, but the presence of short diagonal lines imbues it with dynamism.
It seems clear that the work is the result of one of the intermediate phases in Magnelli’s artistic journey, undertaken both individually, and under the influence of the avant-garde movements with which he was in direct contact during his stay in Paris (15 March – 10 May 1914).

This journey was to guide the Florentine maestro ever closer towards abstraction.
As Armando Brissoni writes, “What are these representations that stand out geometrically? […] these characters are not commonplace; they are imaginings that increasingly estranged from reality, from the environment in which they were called to live some months ago. […] the contrast between a stylised figure and the geometric tessellation, the sinusoidal line that is almost abolished in favour of wide, neat areas of colour – may we not describe these as the prelude to the period immediately to follow?”

As Dr Mirella Branca writes, “this canvas can with all probability be chronologically located after Magnelli’s trip to Paris in the spring of 1914. During this trip, Magnelli, who already had some exposure to theoretical Cubism through reading the works of Gleizes, Metzinger, and Apollinaire, updated his knowledge of Cubism and Orphism.

This is evidenced by the proximal research Magnelli pursued into the contemporary sculptures of Archipenko, the artist from whom Magnelli, as is well documented, purchased three works during his Parisian sojourn.”
Moreover, as witnessed by an extensive set of drawings dated to around 1914, in this period Magnelli appears to have particularly attracted to stylised figures, similar to marionettes, whose disjointed limbs assume unnatural positions and whose faces are reassembled into a few existential features. It is this sort of “dancer-marionette” that is given an effective and unprecedented incarnation in the canvas within the Peruzzi de’ Medici collection. In this case, the stylisation of the human figure is joined by the geometric stylisation of the environment.

This definitively abandons a natural outline, and achieves, as it were, an architectural (de)composition of planes and solid figures, not unrelated to a personal reinterpretation of the fourteenth-century paintings of the Tuscan Masters.

The evolution of Magnelli’s pictorial technique goes hand in hand with the stylisation and geometrisation of forms. Colour is now spread thinly so as to reveal the weave of the canvas, but also allows the application of a rich substance sufficiently thick to alter the surfaces with wide outlines and “almost dramatic chiaroscuro”
R. Longhi
(cf. Stefano Masi, Alberto Magnelli. Danseuse-Marionette/Ballerina-Marionetta (Ritmi. Nudo), Galleria Tornabuoni, Florence)