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Amerigo Tot
(1909-1984)
Amerigo Tot 4.jpg

born in Fehérvárcsurgó, Hungary - died in Rome, Italy

 

“If God turned me into a sculptor, I would ask for Arp’s eye, Moore’s ability to draw, and the strength in Tot’s thumb,” said Picasso once. It is no wonder that as a sculptor, he would have asked for the robust fingers of Amerigo Tot, an artist of Hungarian origin living in Italy – as Tot could deploy them with devilish ingenuity. He modelled, drew, poured and sculpt- ed, choosing at his will. He was a Picassoesque character, a lively hedonist, a roisterer and a bragger, yet a universally beloved figure who could speak in many styles over a half-century career. He understood the aesthetics of ancient art just as well as mid-century design. He was a sculptor but also created ceramics, working for the Italian state, the Hungarian Com- munist Party and the Pope. In the meantime, he even found time to play Don Corleone’s bodyguard in The Godfather. An adventurous Uomo universale of the twentieth century.

 

Amerigo Tot – christened as Imre Tóth – was born in 1909 in a small Hungarian village and grew up in Budapest. His gendarme father wanted him to become a lawyer but he chose fine arts. He graduated from the Hungarian Royal Drawing School, and in the meantime, became involved with the Munka (Work) Circle, led by Lajos Kassák, the straight-talking, never-negotiating, core member of the Hungarian avant-garde. As a member of this left-wing society, he beat up far-right demonstrators in Budapest in 1930, for which he was imprisoned by the authorities. After his release, he headed for Germany, where he was accepted into the best school of modern art, the Bauhaus in Dessau. He travelled by foot to the Bauhaus – which was run by Hannes Meyer, an avid proponent of the institution’s left-wing years – and was taught by masters such as Josef Albers. After a brief but influential period of study in Dessau, he wandered the North Sea as a sailor before returning to the classroom, studying under the supervision of Otto Dix in Dresden. In 1933, he was arrested and interned by the Nazis, but made an adventurous escape and eventually fled to Italy. This would be his chosen homeland from then on. In Rome, he worked on sculptural commissions of a classical nature, mainly for the church, and then as a trained paratrooper partisan and a member of the National Libera- tion Front, he fought the Germans. His restless nature didn’t waver following the war: he tried himself at automobile racing and also appeared in films. His most successful creative period was in the 1950s when he created his monumental frieze for Termini Railway Station’s façade in Rome. Completed in 1953, the large-scale relief, comprising riveted aluminium sheets, con- sists of an organically fluttering yet geometric abstract pattern. Tot was at his peak during these years, regularly exhibiting at the Venice Biennale and winning numerous state com- missions for the realisation of public works. It was during this period, in 1952, that the seven murals, each two metres wide and composed of glazed ceramic tiles, were made, all of which will be exhibited by Einspach Fine Art & Photography in the near future.

Tot, like Picasso, discovered the ceramic technique in the late 1940s, not in Vallauris, however, but in a workshop in Vietri, near Naples. Then, Tot, who had previ- ously worked in an impeccably elegant neoclassical style, radically simplified his formal language. Following the venerable doctrine of analytic cubism, he abstracted the Greek human figures sweeping across the friezes until they became nonfigurative shapes, only partially evocative of spatiality – most akin to the formal universe of Abstraction-Créa- tion. In the meantime, he became acquainted with Giuseppe Ragazzini, the renowned dealer in majolica decoration who introduced many modern Italian artists to ceramics. Ragazzini asked Tot to take over the management of a ceramics factory in Vietri sul Mare in 1949. He produced countless pieces during the few, but productive years he spent there.

“The most beautiful works of art of the Vietri period,”wrote Péter Nemes, a dedicated re- searcher of Tot’s oeuvre, “are undoubtedly the ceramic panels, made up of several pieces with geometric decoration. Their technical and formal antecedents are found in the nonfigurative sgraffitos Amerigo Tot made in 1948–1949 to decorate the pavilions and exhibition spaces of major Italian fairs. First, the artist painted a white wall surface black, then, using a spatula, scratched in the contours of the forms and finally, using the same spatula, he scraped off the background to reveal the underlying layer. Tot followed the same procedure for the panels of 20 × 20 cm tiles but used a glaze instead of paint.” To this day, we are not aware of the exact location for which these works were initially made – it is a certainty, however, that they are tinglingly vivid reminders of mid-twentieth century modernity.

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