Artist Dossier: Alberto Burri

The Italian artist Alberto Burri (1915–1995) was at the forefront of postwar avant-gardism. Starting in the late 1940s, he transformed burlap sacks with pumice and tar into thoughtfully stitched collages, and shaped hunks of wood, iron and plastic into powerful, expressive fine-art forms. His radical use of nonart materials paved the way for the subsequent Arte Povera (literally, “poor art”) movement of the 1960s and ’70s, now seen as a critical influence on much contemporary work.

Burri was well received in the U.S. art world of the 1950s and ’60s—among other laurels, New York’s Guggenheim Museum included him in a group show in 1953, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, presented a midcareer retrospective of his work in 1963. But although a household name in Italy, he remains one of the less famous practitioners of postwar art, overshadowed by such contemporaries as Lucio Fontana (1899–1968) and Piero Manzoni (1933–1963), both of whom were notorious for destroying the perfect surface of the canvas: Fontana by puncturing and slashing it; Manzoni by folding and cutting it.

The market for postwar Italian art is hot right now. Key pieces by Fontana and Manzoni fetch between $1 million and $4 million when they turn up in the 20th-century Italian art sales held each October at Sotheby’s and Christie’s in London or, occasionally, in the houses’ evening auctions of postwar and contemporary art. Yet only seven of Burri’s works have surpassed the $1 million mark at auction. The most recent was his 1959 burlap painting Sacco e Rosso (“Sack and Red”), which sold in February 2007 at Christie’s London for £1.9 million ($3.79 million), an auction record for the artist. “It is incredibly difficult to find works by Burri of this scale and quality in private hands,” Pilar Ordovas, the head of contemporary art for Christie’s London, says of the piece, which hailed from the highly esteemed private Tettamanti collection, in Milan. A mere handful of Burri’s “Sacchi” have appeared at auction over the past 10 years, typically bringing between $500,000 and $1 million. According to Luigi Mazzoleni, of Mazzoleni Arte Moderna, in Turin, which sells Burri’s work on the secondary market, paintings from this series sell privately for between $1 million and $4 million.

Burri’s relative obscurity, and thus affordability, is largely due to lack of supply. “There just aren’t enough works available,” says Stefano Moreni, director of contemporary art at Sotheby’s in Milan. “Fontana, for example, has so many works of different quality and periods out there, and that results in more activity.” Burri created hundreds of canvases, as well as sculptures, stage sets, drawings and prints, in distinctly labeled series, throughout a career that spanned more than four decades, but in the early 1980s he donated the majority of his oeuvre to the Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini, in his hometown of Città di Castella, in Perugia, Italy. They are still housed there today, in galleries the artist designed. “He left the Fondazione what he considered were his best works,” says Mariolina Bassetti, senior specialist and department head of contemporary art at Christie’s Rome.

Burri’s most prolific—and creatively daring—period was the 1950s. Prices for works from this decade generally range from $50,000 to $500,000 today. The earliest of these pieces are his “Muffe” (“Molds”), sculptural canvases made using combinations of sand, pumice, tar and oil paint. Most recently, in 1998, one earned £78,500 ($131,490) at Sotheby’s London. The “Muffe” were soon followed by the “Sacchi,” which juxtaposed stitched squares of burlap with tactile swaths of acrylic paint. These works can have violent overtones, sometimes bringing to mind torn flesh—an allusion to Burri’s experiences as a doctor in World War II. He began making art in 1944, while a prisoner of war in Texas after his unit’s capture in North Africa. Limited to the materials at hand, he painted on burlap sacks. After the war he returned to Rome and continued using burlap. His “Sacchi” are his most iconic works and, therefore, the most coveted by collectors. This is evidenced by the fact that the “Sacchi” series produced not only his auction-record lot but also such other high-priced pieces as Sacco, 1954, which sold at Sotheby’s London in 2005 for £680,000 ($1.2 million).