Sackcloth 1953

Alberto Burri, 1953

So this is the guy who got the Italian parliament asking questions about a sack. We’ll get there. Start with that long white thread up top. It comes loose from a patch and wanders off to the left across the burlap. Alberto Burri. Before he’s an artist, he’s a doctor in the Italian army. During the Second World War, the British capture him in Tunisia. He ends up in a prisoner-of-war camp in Texas. They won’t let him practice medicine, so he starts painting. Art supplies run short, and he starts using empty burlap sacks from the mess hall. Paints on those. He later says, “I painted every day. It was a way of not having to think about the war and everything around me.” After the war, they send him home, and he gives up medicine for good. A few years later, he’s using sacks again. But now he’s cutting them up and sewing them together on a canvas. Look at the patches. The frayed one near the top. The gray one stitched on below it. The cloth gives him color. The stitching gives him lines. Even the holes become part of the picture. He’s making a painting out of the sack itself. So, a doctor, sewing up torn cloth. You can see where people go with that. The guy running the Guggenheim calls him an artist with a scalpel. When Burri tries to explain his own painting, he says, “Words are no help to me.” And then there are the people who can’t get past the sack. What’s an old sack doing on a museum wall? In Rome, the national modern art gallery hangs a big one of these sack paintings. The argument makes it all the way to parliament. A senator raises questions about the work. Another politician wants the woman running the museum moved to a different job. Over a sack. By then, MoMA had already bought this one. The year he makes this, an American artist, Robert Rauschenberg, visits his studio in Rome. Two years later, Rauschenberg’s putting a quilt in a painting. Burri keeps going too. Burns wood. Melts plastic. Welds sheets of metal. So go back to those holes. You can see the dark canvas behind them. In Texas, he used sacks because he needed something to paint on. Here, he’s got canvas. And he’s put the sacks on top of it.

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