Joyce Glasser reviews Antonio Calderara: A Certain Light (until December 22, 2024) at the Estorick Collection, London N1 2AN
Looking at his deceptively picturesque town and landscapes from the 1920s and 1930s, it was perhaps inevitable that Antonio Calderara (1903-1978) would move from figurative to abstract canvases, even if he were unaware of his destiny. The painter’s journey is covered fairly thoroughly in the Estorick Collection’s revelatory exhibition in Islington (London): the first exhibition of Calderara’s work in the UK.
Born in 1903 near Milan, Calderara moved to the shores of Lake Orta in 1936 with his wife and their daughter; a location that inspired him for the rest of his life. We begin with stylised, somewhat architectural paintings of a canal from 1927, and the eye-catching Market Square in Orta from 1929. This is not your typical tourist poster of a charming Italian town although we see its famous Palazzotto and its loggia. The strong geometrical shapes and interlocking volumes, resembling, as the catalogue points out, a theatre set, are what strikes you. The stylisation continues with the people, unidentifiable, all in black with their backs to us, a precursor to Giacometti’s sculpture, The Square, of 1948.
Calderara’s larger painting, The Family: After the Storm of 1934 is an arrangement of volumes and colours against a greyish white background representing the lake and the hills both hidden by mist beyond. The faces of the two women knitting and the little girl playing at their feet do not concern the painter.
All of the figurative landscapes, and the few portraits on show, are marked by what resembles a milky mist over the image, or sfumato, which the artist achieved by superimposing layers of pigment diluted in varnish. Viewers will recognise the effect of particles of light from the Divisionists and Pointillists (such as the French artists Georges Seurat, Jean Metzinger, Paul Signac and many more in other countries).
Though we have no information about Calderara’s travels (except that in the late 1940s he moved to Milan for a time) he was not only aware of colour theory, but of all the latest trends and developments in international art. In later years his home became a meeting place of artists and a foundation. Influences include the Famiiglia Artistica at the Permanente in Milan in the 1920s, the Azimuth group in the 1950s, Piet Mondrian in 1954, and Joseph Albers and Max Bill, proponents of geometric and mathematical abstractions in the 1970s.
Calderara surely knew Albers’ influential 1863 book Interaction of Color and his monumental series Homage to the Square (in which he explored chromatic interactions with nested squares of almost every possible combination). The influence is perhaps clearest in Space Light (1952) or Attraction of White Square into Yellow Rectangle of 1965, loaned by a private collection (as is most of the art).
While some figurative artists turned to abstraction as a reaction to the horrors of WWII, Calderara had another tragedy to contend with. Following the tragic death of his only child in 1944 his art became static and austere. If this period is not well represented in the exhibition, Calderara’s search for a way to give artistic expression to emotional emptiness no doubt began here.
If the death of his 11-year-old daughter (Gabriella with a Fan is in the exhibition) put art and life in perspective, so did the first of three heart attacks in 1950. But it was his encounter with Mondrian’s painting in 1954 that was the point of no return. In 1959 he wrote, ‘My way of painting and drawing has reached that point when to go forward – or rather, to not stop – means moving beyond the figurative’.
There was always a tension in Calderara between the calm and stillness and the impermanence, but it is in his paintings like Attraction of Square into Yellow of 1967 and Central Vertical Tension and Violet Attraction of 1969 that you feel the influence of Albers, Bill and Mondrian, though not Mondrian’s colour palette.
Calderara’s drift to abstraction – the focus of the exhibition – is subtle and if it isn’t entirely organic, it is perhaps a gradual coalescence of influences and emotional incidents, beginning with his discovery of Piera della Francesca in 1927, the year the great Italian art scholar Roberto Longhi’s monograph on the artist appeared.
From then on his art became an exploration of geometry transformed into light, an exploration that was as apparent in the figurative as in the abstract paintings. You can see this exploration clearly in the transitional painting, The Bell Tower of 1959, Little Square in Pella, Lake Orta of 1934 which resembles the geometrically shaped town in the background of Piero della Francesco’s fresco, The Legend of the True Cross.
Similarly, the influence of Piero’s The Baptism of Christ, (the co-subject of a recent ‘close up’ David Hockney exhibition at the National Gallery) is marked in several canvases, from the beautiful Island of San Giulio of 1935, to Near Mount Mottarone from 1952. The sense of calm but of the impermanence of things from one moment to the next that characterises Piero’s work is present in Calderara’s.
Longhi’s monograph also had a lifelong and profound influence on the American painter Philip Guston (Tate Modern’s retrospective of 2023) who was Calderara’s contemporary, both artists dying of heart attacks in June, two years apart.
When Guston, celebrated as a New York Abstract Expressionist along with his high school friend, Jackson Pollock, returned to figurative painting in an infamous 1970 exhibition, the reviews were so scathing that he fled to Italy, where he first encountered the Renaissance artists in the 1940s. Calderara faced the same rejection on his new direction, although his new, abstract work was widely exhibited abroad. Today, his art and that of international artists with whom he established relationships, are displayed for the public in the artist’s former villa-studio in Vacciago.
