Enrico Donati (February 19, 1909 – April 25, 2008) was an Italian-American Surrealist painter and sculptor.
Life and work
Enrico Donati studied economics at the Università degli Studi, Pavia, and in 1934 moved to the USA, where he attended the New School for Social Research and the Art Students League of New York. His first one-man shows were in New York in 1942, at the New School for Social Research and the Passedoit Gallery. At this stage he was clearly drawn to Surrealism. This was reinforced by meeting André Breton and coming into contact with Marcel Duchamp and the other European Surrealists in New York at the time. A typical work of this period, St Elmo’s Fire (1944; New York, MoMA), contains strange organic formations suggestive of underwater life.
Donati was one of the organizers of the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme held in Paris in the summer of 1947, to which he contributed a painting and two sculptures. In the late 1940s he responded to the crisis in Surrealism by going through a Constructivist phase, from which he developed a calligraphic style and drew onto melted tar, or diluted paint with turpentine. He also became associated with Spatialism, founded by Lucio Fontana. Thus began his long fascination with surface and texture, including mixing paint with dust, that culminated in the 1950s in his Moonscapes, a series that has similarities with the work of Dubuffet. The fossil became a major theme for Donati through the 1960s, and he gave new importance to color in his Fossil works, for example in Red Yellow Fossil (1964; Miami, Hills Col., see Selz, p. 19). In 1961, he was given a major retrospective at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and frequently exhibited at group shows in the USA and elsewhere. He held a number of important teaching and advisory posts, including Visiting Lecturer at Yale University (1962–1972).
Death
Considered by some in the art world to be one of the last of the Surrealists, Enrico Donati died in his home in Manhattan on April 25, 2008, aged 99. Donati's health had been failing since involved, as a passenger, in a taxi accident in July, 2007. He eventually succumbed to complications sustained from his injuries.
Museums and collections
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Guggenheim Museum, New York
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri
Museum of Fine Art of Houston, Texas
Boca Raton Museum of Art, Florida
Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Belgium
Museum of International Center of Aesthetic Research, Turin
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, New York
The Detroit Institute of Art, Michigan
University of Michigan Art Gallery, Michigan
Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland·Newark Museum Association, New Jersey
Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, Rome
Mitchener Foundation, Pennsylvania
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Massachusetts
The Rockefeller Institute, New York
Johns Hopkins Hospital, Maryland
Yale University Art Gallery, Connecticut
Washington Gallery of Modern Art, Washington D.C. Tougaloo College, Mississippi Israel Museum, Israel University Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley University of Texas at Austin Museum of Fine Arts, Florida Tacoma Art Museum, Washington St. Paul Art Center, Minnesota The Lowe Museum, University of Miami, Florida High Museum of Art, Georgia Doane University, Nebraska Seattle Art Museum, Washington Weinstein Gallery, San Francisco, CA Vassar College, New York Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania Minnesota Museum of American Art, Minnesota The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. Museum of Art, Florida Orlando Museum of Art, Florida Housatonic Community College, Connecticut Arturo Schwarz Surrealist Foundation, Italy Gallerie di Piazza Scala, Milan, Italy, magma bianco