MARINI-his-artist-quotes-on-his-sculpture-art-and-life

Marino
Marini,
his quotes
on
sculpture
art &
painting by
the Italian
artist
Marino Marini: Rider in bronze, 1947
Marino Marini (1901 – 1980) with his artist quotes on sculpture art and life in Italian
modern art by the sculptor / painter. Marini became famous for his many Horse and
Rider sculptures. From about 1922 his work was influenced by Etruscan sculpture art
and by sculptor Arturo Marini, who he followed as an art teacher, till 1940. In 1943,
Marini went into exile for Italian fascism in Switzerland. In 1946 he settled permanently
in Milan. – Fons Heijnsbroek.
Marino Marini, his artist quotes on his sculpture art & life
painting
- Equestrian statues have always served, through the centuries, a kind of epic purpose.
They set out to exalt a triumphant hero, a conqueror like Marcus Aurelius…
…In the
past fifty years, this ancient relation between man and beast has been entirely
transformed. The horse has been replaced, in its economic and its military functions, by
the machine, by the tractor, the automobile or the tank.
* source of Marini’s quote from 1958: ‘Dialogues – conversations with European Artists
at Mid-century’, Edouard Roditi, Lund Humphries Publishers Ltd London, 1990, p. 86
*****
- The Romantic painters were already addicted to a cult of the horse as an aristocratic
beast… …From Géricault and Constantin Guys (both were romantic French painters, fh)
to Degas and Dufy, this cult of the horse found its expression in a new attitude towards
sport and military life….
…In Odilon Redon’s visionary renderings of horses and later in
those of Picasso and Chirico, we then see the horse become part of the fauna of a world
of dreams and myths.
* source of his quote from 1958: ‘Dialogues – conversations with European Artists at
Mid-century’, Edouard Roditi, Lund Humphries Publishers Ltd London, 1990, p. 86
*****
- Until the end of the fascist era and of the war, I continued to hark back to the sober
realism (in his human figure sculpture, fh) of the artists of the Etruscan funerary figures,
or the sculptors of some Roman portraits, especially the earlier ones. My own way of
reacting against the imperialist pathos of official Fascist art continued, until 1944, to
consist in identifying my art very consciously with my private life, so that I never
allowed myself any form of expression that might seem too blatantly public.
* source of Marini’s quote from 1958: ‘Dialogues – conversations with European Artists
at Mid-century’, Edouard Roditi, Lund Humphries Publishers Ltd London, 1990, p. 87
*****
- ...I am no longer seeking, in my own equestrian figures, to celebrate the triumph of any
victorious hero. On the contrary, I seek to commemorate in them something tragic – in
fact, a kind of Twilight of Man, a defeat rather than a victory. If you look back on all my
equestrian figures of the past twelve years (1946 – 1958, fh) you will notice that the
rider is each time less in control of his mount, and that the latter is each time more wild
in its terror, but frozen stiff, rather than reared or running away. All this is because I feel
that we are on the eve of the end of a whole world.
* source of Marini’s quote from 1958: ‘Dialogues – conversations with European Artists
at Mid-century’, Edouard Roditi, Lund Humphries Publishers Ltd London, 1990, p. 87
*****
- My equestrian figures are symbols of the anguish that I feel when I survey
contemporary events. Little by little, my horses become more restless; their riders less
and less able to control them. Man and beast are both overcome by a catastrophe similar
to those that struck Sodom and Pompeii. So I am trying to illustrate the last stages of
the disintegration of a myth, I mean the myth of the individual victorious hero, the uono
di virtù of the humanists. .
* source of Marini’s quote from 1958: ‘Dialogues – conversations with European Artists
at Mid-century’, Edouard Roditi, Lund Humphries Publishers Ltd London, 1990, pp. 87-88
*****
- But I am no longer trying to formulate a stylised version of anxiety such as we find in
the Laocoon group and in so many other sculptures of the Silver Age of antiquity. I feel
that these works are always a bit too melodramatic. If you really want to find the
sources of my present style (1958,fh) in antiquity, I must confess that you will find them
in the remains of the life of the past rather than in those of its art. The fossilized corpses
that have been unearthed in Pompeii… …if the whole earth is destroyed in our atomic
age, I feel that the human forms which may survive as mere fossils will have become
sculptures similar to mine.
* source of Marini’s quote from 1958: ‘Dialogues – conversations with European Artists
at Mid-century’, Edouard Roditi, Lund Humphries Publishers Ltd London, 1990, p. 88
*****
- I had been born in an Earthly Paradise (Tuscany, Italy), fh) from which we all have
expelled. Not so long ago a sculptor could still be content with a search for full, sensual
and vigorous forms. But in the past fifteen years (1943 – 1958, fh), nearly all our new
sculpture has tended to create forms that are disintegrating.
* source of Marini’s quote from 1958: ‘Dialogues – conversations with European Artists
at Mid-century’, Edouard Roditi, Lund Humphries Publishers Ltd London, 1990, p. 89
*****
- …Machines change their style so rapidly. If one tries to reproduce them in art as
realistically as man and the horse in classical art, one immediately lapses into a kind of
anecdotic or documentary art… Only the stylisation of a painter like Leger (French Cubist
/ Purist painter, fh) could integrate the machine as the subject matter of art. Here in
Italy, the futurists, before 1914, attempted a similar integration of the machine…
…César (a sculptor in the generation of Marini, fh) creates with elements borrowed from
industry and the world of machines, sculptural fossils that appear to have survived the
same kind of catastrophe as my own figures. But I would like to show you (Eduard
Roditi, fh) now in my studio my latest fossils….
* source of Marini’s quote from 1958: ‘Dialogues – conversations with European Artists
at Mid-century’, Edouard Roditi, Lund Humphries Publishers Ltd London, 1990, p. 89
Marino Marini, short biography and life facts of the
Italian sculptor & painter - taken from Wikipedia
Marini attended the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence in 1917. Although he never abandoned
painting, Marini devoted himself primarily to sculpture from about 1922. From this time his work
was influenced by Etruscan sculpture art and the art of the sculptor Arturo Martini. Later in his life
Marini succeeded Martini as professor at the Scuola d’Arte di Villa Reale in Monza, near Milan in
1929. He retained this position until 1940.
During this period, Marini traveled frequently to Paris, where he associated with Massimo Campigli,
Giorgio de Chirico, Alberto Magnelli, and Filippo Tibertelli de Pisis. In 1936 he moved to TeneroLocarno, in Ticino Canton, Switzerland; during the following few years the artist often visited Zürich
and Basel, where he became a friend of Alberto Giacometti, Germaine Richier, and Fritz Wotruba. In
1936, he received the Prize of the Quadriennale of Rome. In 1938, he married Mercedes Pedrazzini
He accepted a professorship in sculpture at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, Milan, in 1940. In
1943, he went into exile in Switzerland, exhibiting in Basel, Bern, and Zurich. In 1946, the artist
settled permanently in Milan. Marini is buried at Cimitero Comunale of Pistoia, Toscana, Italy.