– Forever Gnoli –
The “M for Malfroid” alphabet book
is a series of articles inspired by things seen,
read, heard, current or otherwise that we love
and that we will share here, on our blog.
“G for Gnoli” comes from a sunny Sunday in April, wandering through Parisian flea markets, when the cover of a small magazine caught my eye. I leaf through it and am dazzled. In it, I discover the extraordinary paintings of an artist I did not know: Domenico Gnoli.
We reproduce here the article by critic Guy Dumur which appeared in this same magazine and was published by the National Center for Contemporary Art (CNAC) on the occasion of the Gnoli exhibition held (in Paris?) from November 16, 1973, to January 7, 1974.
It also happens that an exhibition was recently dedicated to Gnoli at the Prada Foundation in Milan. It ended in February 2022.
j.r.
Useful links
GNOLI / PRADA Foundation: article
An image of Domenico Gnoli
Domenico Gnoli? He was Fabrice del Dongo turned painter. A young man, or rather, a young man, of exceptional elegance, more intelligent than anyone, marked by good fortune. He went through life like a fairy-tale prince. He was a 19th-century character, very Carbonaro and Risorgimento, but not at all “out of place,” as one usually says, in the 20th century.
I still see him as he appeared to me for the first time in Deya, the only village in Mallorca still preserved, on the most beautiful coast of the island, not far from that Charterhouse—not of Parma, but of Valldemosa—where two other romantics had, one hundred and thirty years earlier, sheltered their sad love affair.
It was in a garden tucked away in the hollow of a valley, surrounded by philodendrons as large as trees. The exotic aspect was accentuated by Gnoli’s attire, a white uniform—"bought at the Rome flea market," he would specify—and the presence of his Eurasian wife of surprising beauty. Seeing them, one thought they could only live on an island.
Original photography by Jack Robinson.
www.robinsonarchive.com
They had arrived to settle in a few days earlier in this village where Robert Graves has reigned since 1928, himself brought there by Gertrude Stein, who had come with Picasso. A very snobbish village, as you can see.
In Deya, where everyone is poor with affectation, the Jaguar of this Italian aristocrat had initially been unwelcome. The Gnolis had rented, five kilometers away, a fairly mundane house, but one that overlooked the sea and the setting sun like an Olympus, where these young gods would cook the fish they had caught in the morning. Later, Domenico would persuade the heirs of an Austrian archduke to rent him an admirable, totally isolated house that was like a set for "Paul and Virginia." They spent six or seven months of the year there, loving nothing so much as the winter, when he and his wife lived completely alone, but with two horses and, anchored in the port of Soller, a very stylish, though slightly rotting, yacht that had also belonged to an archduke—a Russian one this time.
The man from whom he had bought this boat had a copper plaque on his door where it was engraved above his name: "Representative of the Russian nobility in Mallorca"...
Domenico loved this kind of absurdity. He collected them. But he lived as Byron had lived, or, in his youth, Lamartine, and it is difficult to explain to an era like ours what was so fascinating about this way of life.
The luxury of this young lord was only apparent. It may not emerge from the preceding lines that Domenico Gnoli was poor. His freedom, his Stendhalian nonchalance, he owed only to his work. His paintings, of course, sold well. But he also used a prodigious graphic skill, which allowed him to work for English and American magazines. First, the applied, hyper-realistic drawings, if you will, to illustrate articles on anatomy or sidereal geography. Later, he became a reporter for these same newspapers that would send him to faraway lands to—the height of paradox—draw what he had seen. There he became more personal, not hesitating to mix styles; both expressionism and surrealism, it was all the same to him, being demanding only about what he held dear.
These trips, nevertheless, played a big role in his life. Something unexpected always happened. Like winter, for example, when he went to Soviet Russia and was received in a sumptuous dacha, with a private pool and ice rink, six servants, two Mercedes (...). Domenico Gnoli attracted the marvelous. He talked a lot and listened even more.
A mixture of Italian, Uruguayan, and French, he spoke these three languages, plus English, with devilish ease.
Being multilingual encourages confidences. Fishermen, bullfighters, filmmakers, writers, and many painters were Domenico’s friends. Everyone had told him their life story, and there were also the stories of his own family, on the Italian side, which counted quite a few originals.
I especially remember the story of his grandfather, an academic poet. At sixty, he had published some very beautiful poems for love and died the day it became known that they were his. But Domenico also recounted in a very astonishing way the backstage of the Vatican, where, as a young Roman boy of a good family, he had lived, just before becoming a set designer for Jean-Louis Barrault in Paris.
How many people hadn't he known? How many lives had he led? All this was very extraordinary, and what was much more so was that he would paint for long weeks, long months locked away, attentive only to an infinitesimal detail of metaphysical dimension.
I do not know if he was happy. He should have been more so than anyone. And yet he carried death within him. A death that, nowadays, only exceptionally and by accident touches young beings. Struck by a terrible illness at the moment of his greatest success, Domenico Gnoli disappeared in a few weeks, as if all the talents, all the perfections he had accumulated had exhausted the good fortune that, in the end, made him someone more vulnerable than those who struggle with the mediocrity of life.
Guy Dumur
0 comments