Enzo Plazzotta

Enzo Mario Plazzotta was born at Mestre, near Venice, on May 29th 1921. After the death of his father two years later, the family moved to Lake Maggiore, and Plazzotta spent the rest of his childhood there. At seventeen, having discovered his aptitude for sculpture he enrolled at the Accademia di Brera in Milan to study under Messina. It was not until after the War that he came under the aegis of Manzu, who exerted a considerable influence over his work.

However, Italy’s entry into the War abruptly interrupted his studies. Plazzotta volunteered for the regiment of the Bersaglieri and was sent to North Africa, where he was awarded the Silver Medal for military valour. Back in Italy, at the time of Mussolini’s fall in 1943, he made a break with the Fascist regime and went up into the mountains to found a partisan formation with other deserters and political refugees. Betrayal by an infiltrator led to his capture and solitary confinement. After six months’ imprisonment, he escaped while in transit to Mauthausen, and crossed into Switzerland, where he worked to better relations between the partisans and the Allies. In the closing months of the War, he returned to Italy to participate in the final struggle for national liberation.

After this four-year break, Plazzotta returned to the Brera to complete his studies. Having graduated, he was commissioned by the Italian Committee for National Liberation to make a statuette, the figure of David, to symbolise the ‘spirit of rebellion’ which had characterised the Italian resistance movement. In 1947, the sculptor accompanied General Cordorna, a prominent anti-fascist leader, to present the figure to the British Special Forces in London, honouring their work with the partisans. Although he had only anticipated a short stay, he was so drawn to the British way of life that he decided to settle in London. He first found work as a portrait artist but later, with a family to support, he was obliged to turn his attention to more lucrative pursuits. Rather than practise his art merely as a hobby, he gave up sculpting altogether. Instead, he set up a commercial art agency in London, which specialised in importing Milanese art and design.

It was not until the early sixties that Plazzotta found himself in a position to take up sculpting again. With a few exceptions, all the work illustrated here is the product of this new period. As most of the earlier work was never cast, it could not be traced for documentation. Plazzotta was already in his forties and all too aware that this was late in the day to embark on such a demanding profession. His prolific output in such a relatively brief working span attests his underlying sense of urgency. He was conscious that financial difficulties had thrown an obstacle in his path in the past, bringing to a halt what he felt deeply, to be his true vocation. Now it was a question of coming to terms with these material considerations, not only to sound a voice in the forum, but also, more fundamentally, to be in a position to continue to sculpt at all. This endeavour, the aims of which he successfully achieved, explains the duality of his work in this phase. On the one hand, there are the more accessible public works which reflect and incorporate the popular tastes of the day; but to redress the balance, there is a core of more personal work which does not shy away from difficulty, either technical or symbolic, and which succeeds in making its own bold statements.

Plazzotta always retained close links with his native Italy. Apart from casting much of his work in Pietrasanta, he also kept a small studio there until his death, reaping the advantages of an environment in which artists and craftsmen worked alongside each other, pooling their respective talents with the common aim of producing finished objects of high quality. Many of the remaining editions are still cast, chased and patinated by the artisans with whom he worked so closely during his lifetime.

Pietrasanta’s situation near the Carrarra Mountains, where so much Renaissance marble was quarried, also afforded him an opportunity to try his hand at carving, and he executed a significant number of figures both in marble and in onyx. But at heart he was a modeller, preferring to work in wax with its inherent versatility. He also used clay for portraits and some larger scale pieces, and carried out experiments in Perspex, sinking figures into the transparent substance as a personal solution to the problem of representing bodies suspended in space. His main departures from the sculptural idiom were the series of etchings as well as some experimental work in acrylics.

In 1976, in recognition of his services to Italian art, Plazzotta received the title of Cavaliere from the Italian government. In the same year, he moved into the Garden Studio in Cathcart Road, built by Sir Charles Wheeler as a working sculptor’s studio. The abundance of space and light, together with the legacy of a wealth of mechanical equipment, encouraged Plazzotta to start producing more life-size pieces and enabled him to bring to fruition projects which he had been mulling over for some years. The last of there was the monument to a figure of the past whom he greatly admired, Leonardo da Vinci. Sadly he was only able to complete the maquette for this project before he became ill with cancer in 1981 and died within the same year. Thanks to the determination of his sponsor and the application of his assistant, Mark Holloway, the monument was completed posthumously in 1982 and erected outside the Italian Institute in Belgrave Square in 1984.
Carol Plazzotta

The sculpture of Enzo Plazzotta has long been a subject of critical controversy. The question of technical accomplishment has never been at issue, for it is unquestionably impeccable, whether in bronze or silver cast from wax, carved in stone or sculpted in low relief, as medallions, or even in the very different fields of engraving and etching. Instead, the discussion has focused on his refusal to accept the anti-representational conventions of modernity, and on his preference for more traditional subjects and models. When he began to show regularly in London and Paris in 1966, Plazzotta was often compared with inevitable disadvantage, to Michelangelo and Rodin, by critics disinclined to note the interplay in his work between important departures from the manner either of the Italian master or of the French, and a keen awareness of their plastic appreciation of space.

These critical misreadings are easy to understand. The Rodinesque influences in his Man of Action (1966) and his Study for Adam (1967) driven from Eden, for example were deep and evident enough to lead many critics unquestioningly to place him in a tradition which only partly informed his own individual idiom. What they neglected was Plazzotta’s essential lack of interest in trying to readdress sculptural problems which Michelangelo and Rodin had already satisfactorily resolved.

At the same time, criticisms of Plazzotta as the undiscriminating follower of this figurative tradition neglected the marked extent to which he had involved himself in an enterprise of formal innovation. By the time of the London and Paris shows of the late ‘60’s, he had already produced a startling Crucifixion (1967), in which the body of Christ serves also as part of the cross from which He hangs; Hiroshima (1967), a monstrous Cyclops frozen in the act of hurling, pell-mell, a swarming plurality of matter; and a group of Implosions, discordant internal collapses of energy, epitomes of destructive havoc reiterated in the later Warriors (1970), in which a pair of gigantic, limbless trunks battle beneath a violent agglomeration of machinery. It is in these images, of 1966 to 1970, that Plazzotta stakes his claim as both worthy successor to, and developer of, the work of the great Italian Fururiests, Umberto Boccioni and Carlo Carra.

It was at about this time that Plazzotta embarked on a number of sculptures which, because of their comparative scarcity and singularity, have remained generally ignored or neglected. Notable among the work of this period is an Adam (1968) carved in marble, Tide (1969), a water-spirit in onyx; and the marine giants, the Carmargue Horses, sea breakers and near wild animals combined, which formed a major group in the first of the one-man shows held in the grounds of Stowe (May/June 1969).

In December of that year was held, at the Acquavella Galleries in New York, the first major retrospective of the bronzes created from 1962 onwards. From this show emerged three new themes, which, even as they demonstrated the versatility and vigour of Plazzotta’s art, rendered it vulnerable to critical carping. His dynamic images from the ballet, the tumbling and galloping of horses, and the delectable female nudes brought complaints from commentators, who, writing with more prejudice than knowledge, and discarding the evidence of eyes and minds, were anxious to cast the work as a commercial digression from the cultural norms of post-industrial art.

At the same time, however, Plazzotta won new and eloquent defence. For it was of the first Acquavella retrospective that Richard Walker observed: “To categorise Plazzotta a figurative as opposed to an abstract sculptor is meaningless. Here, simply, is the proliferation of a fecund spirit taking the form it does because it must.” And Walker went on, challenging the easy equation between the conditions of urban existence and its supposed corollary in the dislocations of abstract art, to note the characteristic rejection, in Italy, of the divisions between the intellect and the senses manifested in most other contemporary cultures. And although he lived and worked, for most of his life, in England, Plazzotta was, by education and temperament, supremely a sculptor in the Italian mould. It was an Italian who, in the nudes of the period, offered so subtle a challenge to his critics. The Young Mother (1970) holding aloft her baby and Leda embracing The Swan (1970) are both ecstatic nudes and beautiful women; The Four Seasons (1971) are essentially four female nudes in movement; Charlene (1971) is a naked girl adjusting her ballet slipper. All of them are sensual and evocative embodiments of beauty which strongly pose the age-old questions of eroticism in art: Why, they ask, in their very manner of offering an answer, should not the artist exult in the portrayal of feminine beauty?

As for the ballet, Plazzotta took no facile course, marking only the ‘pretty’ interludes of Dance. On the contrary, he modelled the dancers at full stretch – the Nureyev Triptych (1970), Nadia Nerina (1970 & 1972) en arabesque; Dowell and Sibley in rehearsal in Friday’s Child (1972), in muscle-testing movement in Fish Dive. In ballet, he found the ideal medium in which to develop an interest, discernible throughout his work, in the motive vigour of the human body.

In these works and in similarly dynamic equestrian pieces, Plazzotta achieves what the academic critic is all too ready to neglect: a vivid and powerful naturalism, ideally geared to the expression of bodily energy and joy. The critics who lamented Plazzotta’s shift away from the ominous discomposure of the earlier images found the criteria of urban estrangement barely applicable to the new works. ‘Townies’ to a man, perhaps they had never seen a pony let loose in a fresh, lush field, or a racehorse and his donkey companion resting and chasing one another in pasture: Plazzotta’s observations of such a pair underlies his Red Rum series of 1978. It is a measure of the great plurality of Plazzotta’s work that it can accommodate not only the violence but also the sheer pleasure of movement.

Fortunately, Plazzotta was sure enough of his own criteria not to be deterred by undiscerning criticisms of his work as elitist, anachronistic, or unresponsive to the contemporary notion, as one commentator put it, of “a change of the status of the visual arts brought about by technological advance”. If his work communicates a single message, it surely concerns the arbitrariness of this limit, so often and automatically set, to the modes of expression deemed ‘authentic’ within an industrialised culture. Plazzotta’s idiomatic diversity achieves its own meaning, in which we can find reflected much more than simply the alienation’s so often held compulsory for artistic expression of, and in, a mechanised world.

In the end, we are able to let the sculpture itself speak, as it did in the second retrospective at Stowe, in 1976, and the even greater retrospective of 1980 at The Holme, the villa designed by Decimus Burton at the edge of the lake in Regent’s Park, London, exhibitions which definitively showed the extent and depth of Plazzotta’s achievement. This last retrospective collected, and displayed to marvellous effect, a range of sculpture and graphics excellent enough to elicit a chorus of critical praise. It confirmed the eventual triumph of the sculpture over a prejudice which had, for so long, refused to accept it on its own terms.

It is in this context that the last word ought, perhaps, to be left to the Rumanian master Constantin Brancusi. Asked the purpose of his vocation, he replied that each time he made a sculpture he made every beholder his debtor – ‘With each sculpture,’ he put it; ‘I give you pure joy.’ Max Wykes-Joyce with Thomas Keymer

Adam