Literature

Lantern, March 1961, illustrated in black and white.

Notes

Conscripted into Mussolini’s army to fight in North Africa, Edoardo Villa was wounded at Sidi Barrani in 1942, hospitalised in Port Said, and sent to South Africa as a prisoner of war. Along with some 70 000 Italian inmates, he spent the remaining years of the War in the Zonderwater camp on the eastern outskirts of Pretoria. Having trained before at the Bergamo Academy, Villa was allowed to sculpt during his internment, making a number of fine portraits and emotive, multi-figure compositions. Moved by the harsh Highveld landscape, and presumably sensing opportunity, Villa decided against returning to Italy after he was released, settling instead in Johannesburg as a professional sculptor. While his early-career work tended toward naturalism, often typified by religious subject matter and expressive, Rodinesque modelling, an interest in sleek stylisation and abstraction emerged in the late 1940s. Encouraged by his friend Vittorino Meneghelli – a Venetian émigré, businessman and art collector with close links to the Italian avant-garde – Villa pursued a more a radical simplification of form in the early 1950s, taking cues from modernist sculptors such as Alberto Vianni, Constantin Brâncuși and Hans Arp. Villa started experimenting with steel in 1952, bending, pinching and welding together thin cylindrical rods to construct abstract forms with a distinct linearity. No doubt aware of the cage-like structures made by Pablo Picasso and Alberto Giacometti, particularly in the 1930s, these formative sculptures, intricately composed, had a graphic quality. An early example such as The Assailants, for instance, made in 1952, read like a line drawing in space. While spindly, light and calligraphic at first glance, on close inspection the severe curves, sharp points and lance-like limbs suggest a tension and dynamism – even violence – in keeping with the sculpture’s title. The current lot, Horizontal Figure I, executed in 1957, shortly after Villa was chosen to exhibit works at the 1956 Venice Biennale, is a milestone work from the artist’s first phase of abstraction. Conceived, presumably, as a bare-bones relief or symbolic trellis, Horizontal Figure I is very closely related to African Rhythm, a seminal sculpture from 1956. While the latter is freestanding and helical, the former is horizontal and expansive. Both incorporate slanted and overlapping grids, angled planes of sheet metal, solid kites, spikes, and elegant, smoothly-bent rods. Both evoke a sense of movement and cadence, while each design relies on negative spaces to form pattern. Horizontal Figure I is inextricably linked to the African flora and Highveld landscape of Villa’s imagination. Details in the sculpture bring to mind the dry thorns, sturdy cacti and sharp blades of grass of the artist’s natural environment. The linear clarity of the form, moreover, mimics the sharp contours of the local landscape under the harsh Highveld light. Villa acquired Douglas Portway’s Kew home and studio in 1960. Horizontal Figure I, a beautiful and appropriate frieze, was immediately installed high up on the whitewashed walls of Villa’s new studio, where it remained for decades, exposed to the elements and witness to the artist’s boundless energy and creativity.