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).

By the middle of the decade, Burri had begun experimenting with fire—to make a series of works he called “Combustione”—burning iron, wood, plastic and burlap with a blowtorch. Two such burlap creations, known as his “Sacco Combustione,” have appeared at auction in the past decade, selling for around $500,000 each. One of these, from 1953, achieved £341,250 ($565,368) at Christie’s London in 2003. Around the same time as his “Combustione,” Burri was also producing the “Legni” (“Wood”) pieces that he assembled and marked with charred gashes—and his “Ferri” (“Iron”) wall hangings, made of sheets of iron welded together and scorched to evoke a raw industrial brutality. Works from the former series have lately sold at auction for between $200,000 and $500,000. The “Ferri” fetch upwards of $400,000; a particularly large one from 1958, Grande Ferro, measuring 79 by 77 inches, sold for £624,000 ($1.18 million) at Christie’s London in 2006.

The darkness of these pieces is not necessarily a reflection of a turbulent existence— Burri’s career and personal life appear to have thrived during this period. In 1951 he married the woman with whom he would spend the rest of his life, Minsa Craig, an avant-garde dancer and choreographer from Wisconsin. In 1953 his group exhibition at the Guggenheim—curated by James Johnson Sweeney, who would go on to organize a show of Burri’s paintings in 1957–58 at the Museum of Art at the Carnegie Institute, in Pittsburgh—put Burri on the map of contemporary art.

In the early ’60s, the artist applied his blowtorch to plastic, creating his “Plastiche” series. The pieces, composed of puckered, gnarled gobs of the melted material, today go for anywhere from $100,000 to $600,000. Meanwhile, he continued to win critical recognition. In 1960 he was awarded the Critic’s Prize at the Venice Biennale and in 1965 the Grand Prize at the São Paulo Biennale. New York’s Museum of Modern Art organized a major traveling exhibition of his and Fontana’s work that ran from 1966 through 1968.

In the 1970s, Burri was dividing his time between his home in the mountains of Umbria and one in Los Angeles, where Craig had professional ties. Dating to this period is his “Cretti” series: delicately cracked monochrome “paintings” resembling sun-scorched patches of earth, made with an industrial building and insulating material called Celotex. Fewer than a handful of the “Cretti” have appeared at auction over the past 20 years. In a rare treat for collectors, three, priced from $500,000 to $2 million, surfaced last December in an exhibition of works from the estate of Craig, who died in 2003, at New York’s Mitchell-Innes & Nash, which represents the estate. The show also contained 14 pieces from other periods. Among the eager buyers was übercollector Howard Rachofsky, who purchased Rosso Plastica L.A., a “Combustione” painting from 1966 in which melted plastic is draped and gnarled around a black hole.

This February the show traveled from New York to De Pury & Luxembourg gallery in Zurich, where it was augmented with the addition of some Burris from private European collections as well as 12 hard-edge abstractions depicting bright red and orange organic forms set against a black background. Commissioned for an exhibition at the Palm Springs Desert Museum in the early ’80s, when Burri had just started using Celotex as a painting surface, the “Palm Springs Cycle,” as it is known, was priced between $5 million and $10 million. (At press time, it was still available, although all the works from Craig’s estate had been sold.) With their emphasis on image rather than material and texture, these Celotex canvases are somewhat of an anomaly in Burri’s oeuvre and tend to do the least well at auction, selling for under $50,000. “People expect to see other materials,” explains Sotheby’s Moreni. “Also, some are violent and totally black and difficult to hang in one’s living room.”

As with most artists, Burri’s works on paper are his least costly. His experiments with the “Combustione” technique on paper tend to sell between $20,000 and $55,000. Burri also produced numerous mixed-media collages, which fetch up to $100,000. The record for an original work on paper is ¤84,000 ($108,808), for a mixed-media “Combustione” from 1957, which sold at Sotheby’s Milan in 2004.

As for Burri’s prints, several editions of 50 and 90 exist, and 15 to 20 etchings and lithographs show up at auction each year in either the contemporary-art or the prints and multiples sales. “While they often go to general print collectors, there is also a trickle-down effect—they catch the eye of those who can’t afford his paintings,” says Tudor Davies, the head of the prints department at Christie’s New York. Christie’s sold three 1977 aquatints last February, each from an edition of 50, for less than $2,000 each. “More-dramatic pieces can cost up to $20,000,” says Davies. The record for a Burri print is $29,860, for the 1965 abstraction Combustioni, from an edition of 11. The five-panel etching and aquatint was not created with fire, but was likely inspired by Burri’s “Combustione” pieces.

“There is a lot of space for his market to grow, because he is one of the greatest postwar artists,” says Christie’s Bassetti. Moreover, Burri, Fontana and Manzoni, “are so inexpensive compared with the New York School,” says David Leiber, the director of New York’s Sperone Westwater, which organized a show of the three artists in 2000. “A major de Kooning or Rothko is in a new price realm, but you can still find a very interesting work by Fontana, Manzoni or even Burri, for under $1 million.” The New York-based art adviser Allan Schwartzman, who counts Rachofsky among his clients, adds, “What we’ve come to realize lately—because we have a more international view of contemporary art and because an increased significance has been placed on the collecting patterns of Europeans due to the strength of the euro and thus their buying power—is that Burri was as significant as Rauschenberg.” According to Schwartzman, the only question is whether great works by the artist will appear on the market.

The next chance to bid on a Burri will be this October in London at Christie’s sale of 20th-century Italian art, where Rosso, a 1953 painting made with pumice, oil and Vinavil, an industrial paint, will be auctioned with a high estimate of £1.2 million ($2.4 million).

"Artist Dossier: Alberto Burri" originally appeared in the May 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's May 2008 Table of Contents.