Emilio Vedova *
(Venedig 1919–2006)
De America - 2, 1976, signed, dated and titled on the reverse, acrylic, charcoal, pastel and paper on canvas, 207 x 203 cm, framed
This work is registered in the Fondazione Emilio e Annabianca Vedova, Venice and is accompanied by a photo certificate of authenticity

Provenance:
Sale, Nuova Brera Arte, Milan, 21 May 1990, lot 156
Alberto Grimaldi Collection, Rome (label on the reverse)
Sale, Franco Semenzato, Venice, 23 March 2000, lot 190
Galleria Excelsior, Asiago (label on the reverse)
Contini Galleria d’Arte, Venice (certificate of provenance available)
Private Collection, Italy (acquired from the above in 2005)
European Private Collection

Literature:
G. Celant (ed.), Emilio Vedova, Marsilio, Venice, 2020, p. 300, no. 436, with ill.
G. Celant (ed.), Vedova De America, Skira, Milan 2020, p. 514, no. 147 with ill.

(...) “I would also like to tell you... of my wandering around America = East Coast – West Coast and vice versa..., driving alone, off the highways... South California and North Carolina, along the Pacific Way falling sheer to the rocks and ocean... “The unknown” that lures on and on... Who says “Americans are nomads?” So are we Europeans...”

“Of course America has stayed with me”.
Transcript by Emilio Vedova of an April 1997 interview for “La Repubblica“. Unpublished.
Archivio Fondazione Emilio e Annabianca Vedova, Venice.

DISCOVERING AMERICA

The United States: ever a land of contrasts. For some, it is the home of freedom and a place of individual reinvention, but also the territory where the ‘American Dream’ of generational redemption can be realised. For others, the United States has always been the symbol of alienating consumerism: a place to be demonised, especially for a certain European intellectual elite who, after the war, saw the shift of the artistic balance overseas as a cultural affront.

Between the mid-1950s and early 1970s, Emilio Vedova went to America to study and attempt to understand this land of cultural, artistic and political contradictions. He did this by exploring its territories, travelling from Massachusetts to Florida, from New York to California with his wife, and giving dozens of lectures at some of the most prestigious universities, such as Smith College, Wisconsin University, and Cooper Union in New York.
Vedova’s travels are an anarchic journey, lacking a defined trajectory. From this meticulous exploration – in close contact with artists and intellectuals – a series of works were born that would occupy a central role in the Venetian artist’s poetics. A cycle that would initiate a new pictorial moment with a “founding and regenerative function” and initiate the transformation towards Vedova’s later maturity.

De America 1976-1977, of which De America no. 2 is one of the most significant “icons”, is composed of large-format canvases, executed in just two years, against the historical context of violent international conflict: in Italy (the Years of Lead), in Europe, but especially in the United States, which had to cope with the duel fronts of the Cold War and the protracted end of the Vietnam War.

A critical reading would see these works as anarchic-conceptual cartographies of the American metropolis’ forma urbis, in which Mondrian’s America of the early 1940s appears to be a distant memory. If the father of Neoplasticism saw the New York series as a consequence of a happy and regenerative relationship with the polis, in Vedova the shapeless urban fabric becomes almost an objective correlative of the socio-cultural dynamics of a country increasingly wrapped up in its contradictions: inflamed and wounded by political, ethnic and social clashes.
In De America no. 2, Vedova embraces that logic of disintegration with even more radical vehemence, shaping connective tissues defined by violent backgrounds, interrupted by scars, and capable of evoking the typically gestural painting of the masters of Abstract Expressionism: from Franz Kline to Willem de Kooning. This juxtaposition seems to be further reflected in another characteristic of the American school: gigantism, a particularly rare element in European Informalism.

It thus seems clear that Vedova appears to open himself up to contact, to contamination, while maintaining a subtle detachment that is expressed, as the artist himself affirms, in a different way of conceiving space: horror vacui lurks in every inch of canvas, constantly nourishing a sense of oppression, a sense of the tragic, of vertigo, which does not seem to offer any redeeming or eschatological perspective.