Variations on a Surrealist’s Theme

‘Before we start the interview I’d like to tell you something about my work,” said Enrico Donati, the 89-year-old Italian-born painter who is the last surviving member of the expatriate Surrealist group that settled in New York during World War II. Speaking by telephone from his studio in New York--a few days before he was scheduled to come to California for an exhibition at the VSA Gallery West in Beverly Hills--he launched into an explanation of how he found the metaphor that has guided his work throughout most of his long career.

“Everyone else was painting so well and wonderfully, I wanted to say something different,” he said, recalling the period in the 1940s when he had established himself as a painter but was in the shadow of older, much better-known artists. “Yves Tanguy was associated with the sea, Max Ernst with the woods. I thought I needed to create a world of my own if I was going to be part of the scene.”

Eventually he drew upon memories of a myth about the mandrake, or mangora, a plant that was believed to have magical powers. “In the 16th century, men were hanged naked,” he said, recalling the legend of the mandrake root. “During the hanging, drops of their sperm would fall to the ground. Roots sprouted where the sperm fell, and the roots were thought to have human features. I don’t believe this, of course, but it’s a good story.”

What particularly appealed to Donati was that the myth concerned the cycle of a person living, dying and then living again in a different form. “That gave me a metaphor of life, death and life, and the concept of rebirth and regeneration has been the theme of my work ever since,” he said.

A consummate storyteller, Donati proceeded to recount another auspicious tale, about finding a fossil on the beach in Dover, England, in 1947. He showed the fossil to Tanguy, who told him how to hammer all around its edges, so that it would split open and reveal what was inside. When Donati opened the fossil, he discovered images in the stone that closely resembled those he had been painting.

“Stone is the most pure form of nature,” he said, adding that his experience with the fossil--which had gone through its own process of evolution--reinforced his interest in the theme of “creation, destruction and rebirth.”

Since then, Donati has created a large body of abstract paintings, ranging from darkly mysterious, organic images rich in associations with natural processes, to relatively crisp, geometric compositions more evocative of man-made structures. Although largely known as a Surrealist, he has ventured far beyond the dreamlike images most commonly associated with that style.

He is, as he readily admits, “a colorist” who pulls out all the stops in an instinctively selected palette that embraces hot pinks, smoldering reds and sizzling yellows. Yet during the 1950s he painted somber compositions of large, rectangular shapes in black, white and gray or earth tones. Still, however restrained they may appear in comparison to his vividly colored paintings, they are far from neutral.

“Black is a color; white is a color,” he says emphatically, referring to the liveliness of even his quietest color schemes.

Texture is another standby in his work, although it has evolved slowly from his flat surfaces of the mid-1940s. Beginning with drips, blobs and spatters of pigment, in keeping with the Abstract Expressionists’ physical style of painting, Donati later removed dirt from vacuum cleaners and mixed it with pigment and glue to create rough surfaces. This led to a variety of mixed-media works with crusty expanses that contrast sharply with smooth passages. In some of his recent works, he has returned to relatively flat surfaces and fanciful, dreamlike imagery that sometimes suggests still lifes or urban landscapes.

Donati’s exhibition, “Six Decades and a Full Circle,” which opened last week, is a succinct survey of his career. Presented by his Los Angeles-based representative, Alter & Gil, at the VSA (Very Special Artists) Gallery West, the show includes a wide variety of paintings and an example of his Surrealist sculpture. “Fist,” a 17-inch-tall bronze made in 1946, replicates a clenched human fist but also resembles a grotesque head, with bloodshot glass eyes glaring out at viewers.

Donati was born in Milan in 1909 and displayed an early aptitude for art but earned a college degree in sociology and intended to be a musician. He moved to Paris in the early 1930s to pursue a career as a composer, but with no success. At the same time, he continued his interest in art, doing some painting, meeting artists and visiting museums and galleries.

The museum that interested him most, however, was the Musee de l’Homme in Paris, known for its anthropological collection. Donati became so fascinated with a few Native American artifacts at the museum that he took his first trip to the United States in 1934, immediately heading for the Southwest.

“I took a boat to New York and then a train to Arizona and stayed there for a couple of months,” he said. From there he journeyed on to Canada to see Eskimos, stopping briefly in San Diego and Los Angeles.

He returned to Paris with a collection of Hopi kachinas and Eskimo masks, some of which are displayed at his home in New York. Although the collection is valuable now, he spent no money on it.

“The Indians didn’t know what money was,” Donati said. He had planned to barter rather than buy, so he arrived in Arizona with items he thought the Indians might like--feathers, beads and stones that could be used in their artwork, and a supply of Swiss army knives.

Most of the trades were transacted silently and even without facing his partners, Donati said. He discovered that if he left a few items outside his sleeping quarters at night, they would be exchanged for handmade artworks.

“I went back to Paris without really seeing New York,” he said, “so three months later I returned and stayed for two years.” In 1940 he went back to New York for good, accompanied by his wife and two young daughters. “The Germans were coming [to Paris] just as we were leaving,” he said.

By then Donati was a seriously committed artist, but he didn’t connect with the European Surrealists until the war years, when a group of them left their homelands and lived in and around New York. Art historian Lionello Venturi saw an exhibition of Donati’s work at the New School for Social Research and introduced him to Andre Breton, who took Donati under his wing.

Breton invited him into a group of Surrealists including Ernst, Tanguy and Marcel Duchamp, who linked up with other expatriates, such as French painter Fernand Leger, and Americans, including sculptor Alexander Calder.

“There was sort of a club,” Donati said. “I became extremely friendly with Marcel Duchamp. He was very nice; he was like my father.”

The two artists collaborated on several projects, including the celebrated cover of the catalog produced in 1947 for the Paris exhibition “Le Surrealisme en 1947.” On the front of each copy of the book is a foam-rubber breast glued onto a swatch of black velvet.

“Duchamp had the idea, and I developed it,” Donati said. The project entailed buying 999 “falsies” and flattening them, he said. “They looked so naked, I bought some black velvet and put each falsie on a piece of cloth so it would look like a breast coming out of a dress. I showed it to Duchamp and said, ‘Please touch.’ But he said, ‘Priere de toucher,’ [don’t touch] and that became its name.”

Donati is full of stories about the Surrealists’ outrageous capers, but he is well aware of being their lone survivor. “When I met them, I considered myself a baby among the elephants,” he said. “Now all the elephants have died.”

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“ENRICO DONATI: SIX DECADES AND A FULL CIRCLE,” VSA Gallery West, 184 N. Canon Drive, Beverly Hills. Dates: Mondays-Saturdays, 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Ends Nov. 14. Phone: (310) 385-0499.