Giacomo Manzù

Compare Sotheby´s, New York, May 14th 1998, no 344 "Busto della Giapponese".
Copy of receipt enclosed.

One might say that the life of Giacomo Manzoni was a real Cinderella story. He was born in Bergamo in northern Italy in 1908 as one of the 12 children in a poor family. His father was a shoemaker and also the sacristan of a convent.
The family was so poor that Giacomo was taken out of school at the age of 11 and sent to work to help support the family.
Due to a set of fortunate circumstances, Giacomo was apprenticed to Master Dossena, a carver and gilder in Bergamo. It soon turned out that young Giacomo had exceptional talent for sculpting and plastic forms. Dossena encouraged him to begin drawing and modelling, and Giacomo created his first works, mostly animal motifs.
At only 13 years of age, he got to study in Fantoni’s school of decorative art in Bergamo, and at 15 he bought a book on the French sculptor Aristide Maillol, which made a great impression on him.
The tough start in life helps explain the absolute clarity of purpose and uncompromising attitude Manzù had towards art – and art towards Manzù.
After completing his military service, Manzù abandoned all schools and studies and dedicated himself totally to his artistic calling. Ahead of him lay a long and successful career as one of Italy's most prominent internationally acclaimed sculptors.
In 1929 Manzù travelled to Paris where he found himself for a time in the very heart of avantgarde art. While taking an interest in the contemporary idiom, he was also very much influenced by the triumphs of late 19th century art, in which he was particularly moved by the impressionist approach.
He soon returned to Italy, settling in Milan in 1930. At the time, Milan was the Paris of Italy. He took the pseudonym of Manzù so as not to be confused with the great Italian writer Alessandro Manzoni.
In Milan, Manzù met such artists as Fausto Melotti and Lucio Fontana, and became quite close with the great futurist Carlo Carrá. He was even a member of the circle of radical Christian intellectuals around the Il Frontespizio journal, a group seeking religious association free from the dogma of state religion.
Manzù got his first important commissions in Milan, such as bronze doors for the chapel of the Catholic University. Bronze reliefs on religious motifs would later often appear in his artistic work. Manzù’s relationship to religion and to representatives of the Catholic Church coloured much of his work. In his early reliefs and bronze sculptures, he experimented with the primitivist style, popular at the time. As early as the mid-1930s, however, he discovered his own style, a soft plastic sculptural idiom inspired by Rodin and the Italian sculptor Medardo Rosso.
In the 1930s and '40s, Manzù, at the time in his twenties, worked with several artistic projects of his own, but also participated in major exhibitions in Rome and Milan.
In addition to his own creative work, he was also a teacher in academies in Turin and Milan. In the Accademia delle belle Arti di Brera, the foremost seat of artistic learning in Milan, his colleagues included such names as Marino Marini and Carlo Carrá.
This was a time when the liberal arts fought for survival under fascist censorship and dictatorial regime. Manzù, who was openly anti-fascist, was dismissed from his professorship in Turin, and he resigned from his position in Milan. Without ever becoming a political artist, Manzù nevertheless used religious themes to express his ideology and his disgust of the brutality of war.
In the late 1930s, Manzù began making bronzes cardinals. His inspiration in this was a visit to the St Peter’s Basilica in Rome where he saw the Pope flanked by two cardinals. Manzù’s cardinals are stylised figures with an almost geometrical pyramidal form. Although they have become almost a trademark of Manzù’s, they actually represent a very different idiom from his other artistic output.
During this time, Manzù also began making female busts in bronze. In his hands, the hard material acquires the smoothness of silk. His ability to make the surface shimmer as it catches the light gives a poetic and sensual mood to these female figures.
These female figures made Manzù even more successful, and at the early age of 29 he had his first major one-man exhibition at Galleria della Cometa in Rome – the catalogue essay was written by Carlo Carrá. The newly opened gallery soon became the hottest art salon in Rome, the place where artists such as De Chirico, Pirandello, Severini and Montale exhibited their work. Manzù was now in the very heart of the Italian intelligentsia. He had countless successes in this period, exhibiting not only in Italy but also in New York and Paris.
It ought to be mentioned that in 1938 he was given a gallery of his own at the Venice Biennale, and again in 1956.
In the last, difficult years of the war, Manzù was forced to leave his work and flee to Bergamo. During this time he produced a series of drawings, which subsequently led to commissions as an illustrator and even as a set designer.
His greatest religious work was created in 1961, when he was appointed to create doors for the St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Manzù was a close friend of the then Pope John XXIII, who is also known as the “Good Pope”. Both came from Bergamo, and shared the same background of poverty in childhood and adolescence. The theme for the doors was man’s encounter with death, but instead of depicting Catholic martyrs as heroes, Manzù chose to portray the poor, the disadvantaged and the forgotten. In contrast to the heavy baroque style of the church’s interior, the bronze reliefs are alive with the spirituality of early Italian renaissance. Manzù was accused of radicalism and his detractors called his a communist, but he answered: “Io vivo per la pace e ho un odio feroce per la guerra. Il tempo mi dà sempre più ragione” “I live for peace and have a violent hatred of war. Time will prove me right.”
The prestigious commission brought Manzù a number of requests to do reliefs for churches around Europe, including the St Lawrence Church in Rotterdam.
Around the mid-1960s, Manzù moved with his family to Aprilia outside Rome. In the nearby Ardea, where he had his foundry, he founded a museum, “La raccolta amici di Manzù”, to which he donated over 400 of his works, including sculptures, drawings and prints. In the early 1980s the museum was donated by Manzù to the Italian state.
Manzù died on 17 January 1991 in his home in Aprilia.
The bust of Emy was made by Manzù in 1973. In this stage of his career, Manzù created a series of pictures of women characterised by a sensual, sometimes even erotic idiom. He had recently met the love of his life, the German dancer Inge Schabel, when he was working in Salzburg, and she appears in countless studies and portraits. Manzù depicted women throughout his entire artistic career: portraits of loving, laughing and playing women. These busts were initially rather severe and introverted, but in the 1960s and ‘70s they soften and acquire a lovely grace. The compositions become at times almost acrobatically complex.
Emy is wearing a thin unbuttoned jacket that reveals here youthful bosom. The work shows an innocent young girl who seems unaware of her own erotic attractiveness. The youthful naivete is underlined by the childish bow in her hair.
The gilded bronze has in Manzù’s hands acquired a soft, almost shimmering plasticity. Manzù has managed to create an intimate portrait of a woman in spite of the charged tradition of the bust as a format. He establishes a contact with the viewer by letting Emy’s hands open the jacket softly, giving the portrait a sense of being an impression – a moment that will soon be over.
The two main thematic interests in Manzù’s life as an artist were religious subjects, which in his hands acquired a humble and human form, and female figures that reflected his love of and fascination with women. For 72 of the 83 years of his life, Manzù worked with art, and was able in his work to make use of his personal life experiences in a way that make him one of the most esteemed artists in Italy in the modern age.