Mario Sironi is one of the pinnacles of 20th-century Italian and European art, for his monumental and severe, dramatic, and synthetic way of stripping form and colour to the essence of expression, as only masters can do.
Milan and its urban landscape are the protagonists of a livid and hauntingly beautiful modernity. Man is alone and lost in his own solitude. The human figure is, as for Donatello and Masaccio, the cornerstone of Sironi’s research: man is a plastic and chromatic mass fighting against nature and the city. The colours are gloomy, brown. With their subdued force they recount the painful depths of the human soul. His works reveal a painfully rare capacity for compositional and chromatic synthesis. The space between man and nature is conveyed by opposing volumetric forces, which lead him, in his last phase, to an abstraction of abysmal harmony that brings him closer to the Olympic plastic gracefulness of Arturo Martini.
“La sentinella” (lot 3, estimated price €1,200 – 1,600), a sublime example in a mixed technique on paper of 1940, will be featured in the web-only auction of Modern works and Multiples until 16 March 2022. Here, in a sad grey monochrome, the artist renders the abyssal physical and spiritual solitude of the soldier.
