Contributed by David Carrier / Emilio Vedova (1919–2006), who lived and worked in Venice, was once aptly dubbed the Jackson Pollock of the barricades. Employing that American painter’s gestural technique, Vedova made political art. “Rivoluzione Vedova” – “Revolution Vedova” – is an appreciative retrospective of his work on the third floor of the spacious M9 Museum of the 20th Century in Mestre, a very short train ride from Venice. It includes five of his small, quasi-figurative paintings from 1945; a number of his larger abstractions from the 1960s; Absurdes Berliner Tagebuch ’64, a series of paintings on wood made in Berlin; photomontages from 1968; tondos from 1985; and an elaborate installation of his heavily pigmented panels.
Harold Rosenberg’s argued that what he called “Action Painting” – American Abstract Expressionism – embodied political points of view. Others, broadly in line with Clement Greenberg’s arid formalism, contended that Pollock and his peers gave up making critical artistic political statements when they broke through to abstraction because there was no way to make the political visually abstract. Vedova tilted decisively towards Rosenberg. When Philip Guston wanted to pivot to political art, he felt compelled to return to figurative painting. Vedova never did, though some of his collages included figurative materials from the newspapers. The title of this show alludes both to the revolution in painting and to his commitment to political revolution, as if the two were inseparable.
When Vedova entered the Italian art world, in the aftermath of fascism, he confronted a ferocious, ongoing debate about realism versus abstraction, and he resolved that abstractions could make political statements. Sometimes he is compared to another Venetian painter who also used a dark palette: Jacopo Tintoretto. But Tintoretto did many figurative paintings of historical events, like the theft of the body of St. Mark by the Venetians. Vedova didn’t depict any such scenes. As quoted in the handsome bilingual catalogue accompanying the exhibition, Vedova felt “distress at being within this society and desiring another” and, stimulated by political events in America and Italy, aspired to “hand-to-hand combat … with the pictorial material.” The photographs of him working in the studio certainly convey that sense of heroic struggle. That said, it is exceedingly difficult to see his often marvelous abstractions as passionate political statements because Italy’s political left – his motive force – had all but disappeared by the end of his life. It is perhaps to his credit as an idealist that this reality seems to have had no effect on his art.
Vedova was a great “crude artist” in Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin’s positive sense of that phrase. They said: ‘The most important thing is to learn to think crudely. Crude thinking is the thinking of great men.” Vedova was no Joan Mitchell, as he rendered mostly monochromatic work. Unlike, say, Lee Krasner, he was invariably thunderous and lacked any sense of delicacy. And his work had none of the expansive variety of, for instance, Clyfford Still. Vedova’s forte consisted of broad and long aggressive strokes of black and white that produced heavily painted all-over fields. Like Franz Kline, he was strongest in his black-and-white works, though his use of red could be impressive. Vedova was notably successful when working on a rectangular panel or a tondo, and the latter was an innovative format for abstraction.
At the same time, Vedova’s paintings on wood and his three-dimensional constructions are sheer chaos, featuring fields of enlarged analytical cubist planes of color, big enough to walk through but without any apparent structural logic. His fundamental idea was that political disorder could be truthfully represented with jangled pictures. This seems to me itself a confusion. Vedova may have simply wanted abstract painting to carry more expressive weight than it possibly could. As a result, the distance between his art and its purported political content seems painfully vast.
At his best, however, Vedova deserves a place alongside the Abstract Expressionists. The catalogue is not terribly enlightening about just how a Venetian painter effectively became a member of this celebrated American movement. Instead, it relates Vedova’s work to the rebirth of Neo-Expressionism in America and Italy in the 1980s, foregoing any discerning discussion about the sources of his earlier work or his political thinking. It also does not mention Carmen Gloria Morales, the important female Italian painter who built on his tondos. There would appear to be plenty of grist for another, more searching retrospective of Vedova’s estimable work.
“Rivoluzione Vedova,” M9 – Museum of the 20th Century, Via Giovanni Pascoli 9, Venezia Mestre, Italy. Through January 7, 2024.
About the author: David Carrier is a former professor at Carnegie Mellon University; Getty Scholar; and Clark Fellow. He has lectured in China, Europe, India, Japan, New Zealand, and North America. He has published catalogue essays for many museums and art criticism for Apollo, artcritical, Artforum, Artus, and Burlington Magazine. He has also been a guest editor for The Brooklyn Rail and is a regular contributor to Two Coats of Paint.
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Great informative essay- Would Karl Marx have liked his work?