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.
