Emilio Pettoruti - Style

Style

Emilio Pettoruti's work was "a prototype of the modern concept of harmony, of order, and of geometric precision, near-scientific in its severity, but oscillating between the lyrical and the purely spiritual." Preoccupied with technique, light, color, and movement, Pettoruti managed to include harmony in his artworks throughout his changing phases. After witnessing Pettoruti's advance in style, Xul Solar wrote that "each stage of his development, even each technical advance, corresponds to a new stage of his soul."

The Beginning

In Pettoruti's youth, while he was discovering his potential artistic talent, he worked on drawings and caricatures of people. He created several caricatures, enough to show forty-six at the exhibition hall of the local newspaper in Buenos Aires.

Early European Period

While in Italy, Pettoruti was influenced by the growing Futurist movement, as well as the fourteenth century Italian Renaissance. While his art reflected at different times futurist, cubist, and abstract qualities, Pettoruti "rejected any categorization of his art." He did not want himself or his artwork to be associated with any one specific movement, since he was constantly altering his style. He worked on space and shape in his compositions, considering color secondary in his paintings. Pettoruti also played around with several mediums. He spread his artistic talent to theater costumes, set designs, and stained glass windows. He became interested in mosaics, exploring the potential mosaics could have on the expansion of his ideas. Not being limited to one medium, Pettoruti incorporated various materials found in garbage dumps into his mosaic to add texture and catch the light in diverse ways. In his early years as an artist, he experimented with "deconstructing ordinary, everyday objects, reconstructing them according to his own rules, and then projecting them into his own artistic universe." This approach to art applied to all of his mediums, including mosaics and painting alike.

Later Years in Italy: Politics and Art

In 1922, Pettoruti went to Milan, where his artwork was influenced by some friends who were members of the Novecento Italiano. This group desired to represent "a 'purification' of Italian art, a re-affirmation of traditional principles in painting, sculpture, and architecture." However, Sironi and Sarfatti, two members of the Novecento Italiano, were also influential to the Fascist principles of Mussolini. Pettoruti's discomfort with the rise of Fascism perhaps influenced his decision to leave Italy and return to Argentina.

Musicians and Harlequins

Pettoruti's choice of musicians as a recurring motif in his artwork began in Europe, but he continued to represent them through the 1920s back in Buenos Aires. The musicians are either shown alone or in groups, and their eyes are always hidden. The musicians Pettoruti depicted have a cultural link, since they were "directly associated with the tango, the inimitable cultural expression of the Argentine capital." One example of this motif in his painting is Quinteto (1927), depicting five street musicians in the abstracted cubist style. In 1927, he switched from representing musicians to representing harlequins, who similarly always had their eyes covered while looking through masks. For Pettoruti, harlequins were a "useful device for representing the human figure, but as an anonymous, remote, generalized form, not as an individual." Of the many paintings Pettoruti worked on, one of his first is titled Arlequin (1928), showing one harlequin wearing a mask over his eyes and playing a musical instrument resembling an accordion.

Still Lifes

In his early still lifes, Pettoruti included several similar motifs, including bottles, glasses, and often musical instruments. He then moved to his Copa series that was "near abstraction." These compositions were "composed of bright, non-nuanced areas of color which tend to flatten out the form. The cup is observed from every possible angle, top, bottom, and sides represented simultaneously." In his later still lifes, Pettoruti focused on light, incorporating it as a "concrete element of the picture," not simply including it for illumination of the scene. His use of light is evident in many of his still lifes, like Sol Argentino (1941), where the sunlight acts as "an essential life-giving element" and is obviously a solid effect to the painting.

Abstraction

In the later years of his life, Pettoruti's style advanced towards absolute abstraction. After returning to Europe in 1952, his interest "in the effects of pattern and design" became apparent from his "dedication to geometry, with its patterns constructed from hard-edged shapes." Many of his paintings consisted of completely geometric compositions, as he "espoused a form of non-objective painting that concentrated on the communicative power of color and controlled organization of shapes." Pettoruti named these abstract works with highly romanticized names, like Winter in Paris (1955) and Summer Night (1953).