In a career that spanned seven decades and two continents, Enrico Donati (1909-2008) is known today for creating enduringly beautiful works in a variety of media that are heralded for their provocative, complex, and mysterious nature. Gaining notice beginning in the 1940s, the Italian-American painter’s work was championed by both the Surrealists (André Breton wrote, “I love the paintings of Enrico Donati as I love a night in May....”) and later the Abstract Expressionists (the legendary Betty Parsons Gallery mounted five solo exhibitions for Donati from 1954-1960). Yet Donati’s art, however exemplary of both, defies fitting neatly into either category. Instead, his work expresses an authentic personal inquiry into cycles of life and death and the nature of myth.
Donati’s genre-defying work mirrors his lifelong study of ancient history, science, geology, and folk art. He had a particular interest in stones and fossils, which suggested to him both the cyclical order of life as well as its permanence, and which he often referenced on his canvases. Marking his rough, stony surfaces with cuneiform-like script and geometric, biomorphic shapes, Donati worked both additively and subtractively, using materials like ground quartz and sand to give his surfaces their sculptural textures.
Born in Milan in 1909, Donati studied biology and sociology at the University of Pavia in Italy, contemporary music composition in Montmartre, Paris, and anatomy, design, and lettering at the Academie Julian on the Rue de Berri. Following the rise of fascism in Italy and the outbreak of World War II, Donati moved with his family to New York City in 1940, where he studied art at the New School for Social Research and met the Surrealist writer and curator André Breton, who became an important advocate for Donati’s work. Breton introduced him to the other European artist ex-patriots living in New York City, including Marcel Duchamp, who became a longtime friend and collaborator.
Donati’s work is represented today in a variety of museum collections worldwide, including the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, among others. Of his place among the great American artists of the 20th century, New York Times art critic John Gruen wrote, “Enrico Donati is that rarity, a man of his time, whose vision is timeless. A painter who, while peering into the past, intuits the future. In short, a master craftsman whose tools are the elements, and whose subject is the universe.”