Page 51 - Studio International - November 1965

Emilio Pettoruti

The House of the Poet 1935
Oil on Canvas
73x541n.
classicism. It is Emilio Pettoruti. That there are affinities
between the two artists. there is no doubt. Less con­
ceptual. however. less scientific. less irregular in its
evolution. less affected by rhetoric. the work of the
Argentinian seems to me superior to that of the
Spaniard. In any case. after the revealing retrospective
of the Galerie Charpentier. a chapter of the history of
modern painting should be revised.
Gone the hermetism. the complexity. the poverty of
the colour justly reproachable in analytic cubism. Gone
too the intellectual preconception. the dryness. the
tight method with which Gris had sustained his
vacillating inspiration. The masses of volumes. the
subtle articulations of planes. the simultaneous use of
many perspective angles. everything in Pettoruti com­
bines itself and merges in a homogenous space and
in a light both concrete and unreal. born of cold tones
and of warm tones contrasting in the bosom of a
clever chiaroscuro. this light sometimes diffuse. some­
times brilliant. this invented light. which seems to me
to be the essential gift of Pettoruti to the revolutionary
aesthetic of cubism.
When he thought he had given to cubism an inde­
fectible and indestructible style. he turned away from
it as soon as he got to France. It seems that in leaving
his country and beginning a new existence somewhere
else. gave him the irresistible need of beginning also a
new career. The compulsion that made him discover in
1916 the virtues of non-figuration. flows once again
in him. more urgently more vividly. What had been
only an attempt became an end in itself. In doing so.
it should be noticed. he does not betray cubism of
which he retained the fundamental structures. but he
was eliminating from it the direct allusions to the object.
Thus. it is that the geometric planes are limited by
verticals and by obliques in the Reve d'enfant (1954)
in the series of ringed forms dominated by curves.
Soleil dans la montagne (1954). /'Hiver a Paris (1955)
for example. then in the Oiseaux (1959-1960) of a
more tensed. more austere facture (L'Oiseau blanc.
L'Oiseau immobile. l'Oiseau blesse) finally in the
admirable series of the Farfalla where the tension shows
itself compatible with a delectable fantasy. So it is. I
Towards n,ght-ome 1961
011 on Canvas say. that since about ten years Pettoruti's painting has
130 X 97 in
relaxed its link with the world of appearances.
No one. more than he. in fact. has more horror of the
compromise. of the licence of the untidy; he abhors the
expressionism. the baroque. this manner of painting
so much vogue nowadays, which makes use of the
accidental. the vulgarity of the material. the violence of
the sensation. to the sway of the instincts or even to
the quest for novelty at all cost. Pettoruti has the love
of orderliness and clarity. He distinguishes himself by
a self consciousness which restrains movement.
bridles the lyrism. hides under a veil of impassiveness
the tumults of the heart. A proud. demanding character.
a passionate temperament but governed by a rigorous
will, an infallible technique acquired through tenacity,
a mind controlling his imagination. a severe discipline
which guards him from faltering and from excesses,
always enamoured with perfection always in quest of
the absolute: this is Pettoruti. In an epoch which the
disappearance of legitimately admired masters has much
impoverished. it would be unforgivable not to recognise
the eminent part which he has played in it and which
he courageously continues to contribute to the elabora­
tion of a pictorial language which will be its total. the
incontestable, the irremediable expression. ■
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