Wednesday, 15 June 2016

"Venus Anadyomene": an important Carlo Carrà work?

Blank (yeah, that really is the name), an auction house from Germany, sells on 25 June 2016 a "twice signed, "Old. Konicek" dated 1922 and "C.Carrà"" Venus Anadyomene in front of the Bay of Kotor (Croatia), a 114 by 100cm canvas estimated at 5,000 Euro.

Carlo Carrà  (1881-1961) was an Italian Futurist (one of the original signatories of the Futurist Manifesto!) who then became a Surrealist (and also, sadly, a fanatical fascist). As a surrealist, he developed the Italian version of it together with Giorgi de Chirico. But this ended around 1920, and he then turned to landscapes and many other forms of painting. All this makes him one of the most important Italian painters of the early 20th century, but in general his later works are less interesting. 1922 would be on the cusp of these periods.

Oldřich Koníček (1886-1932) was a Czech painter who worked in Italy from 1919 on. Although also a respected modernist painter (mainly influenced by Fauvism), he is much less well-known (and important) than Carrà.

It looks to me as if the work for sale is a painting by Carrà made in 1922 when he visited Koníček in Croatia. The signature seems to be a "who (Carra), where (at Konicek) and when (1922)" signature, not an indication that the two collaborated or that one of the two signatures is fake. Koníček has painted the exact same view of the Bay of Kotor in 1916, so we know that he has stayed there. The above work was sold at Dorotheum 2 weeks ago for about 1650 Euro.

The painting for sale is way too ambitious for Konicek, but would fit the late Surrealist work of Carra quite good, even though the end result is a one-off, not really comparable to any other finished work I could find. If this was painted during a stay abroad, with an old friend (not that I have found any evidence otherwise that the two knew each other, but it certainly is quite possible as we know that Konicek stayed in Italy for a while), then it may have been the perfect time for some experimentation, something new and different which still fits well into his oeuvre and style.




It is hard to find the right images to convince people of this at a glance. In 1909 he painted as a pointillist, a year later he painted as a life-long cubist; from 1915 on his works resemble those of De Chirico. The man was a chameleon, although a very early one usually. The above paintings are from 1919-1921.


He painted a Venus Anadyomene II in 1944, so there certainly was one earlier than that. And in 1923 he made an engraving of a Venus in  kind of intermediate position between the two paintings (but in quite a different style again).

If it is an original Carra, then this is an important work and should be worth at least 50,000 Euro instead of the estimated 5,000 Euro. But it will take experts much more familiar with the life and work of Carra to determine whether the above scenario is realistic, or whether this signature is only added to dupe people like me.

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