Alfredo Volpi and Eleonore Koch

Alfredo Volpi – Eleonore Koch

Although belonging to different generations - in fact they were born and died exactly 30 years apart -, in 1953 the artists Eleonore Koch (Berlin, 1926 - São Paulo, 2018) and Alfredo Volpi (Lucca, 1896 - São Paulo, 1988) were mutually introduced by psychoanalyst and collector Theon Spanudis after Koch expressed her interest in continuing her studies at Volpi’s studio. Working during the rise of Concrete Art in Brazil, both artists resisted any kind of official affiliation to the movement. While, to a certain degree, Koch and Volpi undoubtedly absorbed some of the guiding principles of geometric abstraction, they never truly adhered to the orthodox approach advocated by the São Paulo group. Instead, each of them has inexhaustibly pursued their own pictorial language to produce some of the most original and unique contributions to modern painting in Brazil in the 20th century.

However, because their work doesn’t easily fit into the main artistic currents of their time, Koch and Volpi still remain largely unknown to international audiences. In Brazil, Volpi has long enjoyed widespread recognition as one of the country’s great modern masters, having received numerous important accolades during his lifetime and featured in some of the country’s most prominent public and private collections, as well as being the object of several scholarly studies and publications. Koch, on the other hand, despite being actively involved in the São Paulo art scene in the 1950s and 1960s, never achieved the same level of recognition, something which certainly contributed to her move to London in 1968, where she would remain until the late 1990s. As a consequence, her work has remained largely under the radar even in Brazil, having only started to gain renewed critical attention in the past few years.

From 1953 to 1956, Koch frequented Volpi’s studio every Saturday, an experience she once described as learning ‘through observation and being together, eating together, washing the dishes, observing his work rhythm, how he prepared the canvas, lived his fate as an artist and had the courage to destroy works that were not up to the mark’.[1]Importantly, with Volpi she also learned to work with egg tempera, a technique which she would embrace thereafter. If it is true that the use of this artisanal, fast-drying painting medium, combined with a shared interest in experimenting with a wide variety of pigments and colour chromatic variations, suggests an approximation between Koch’s and Volpi’s work - Koch is often referred to as ‘Volpi’s only disciple’ -, the present exhibition is above all an opportunity to observe how each artist has consistently explored different pictorial problems in their work.

The child of working-class Italian immigrants, Volpi arrived in São Paulo at two years-old and after finishing primary school, started working as a bookbinder and later as a painter-decorator. As a self-taught artist of humble origins who always maintained a modest lifestyle, his public image has mainly been that of a naive genius - a myth reinforced even by such prominent critics as Mario Pedrosa. In 1957, when Volpi had a major survey exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, Pedrosa wrote in his catalogue essay: ’Surely he has never even opened a foreign art magazine to study reproductions of Picasso, Matisse, Renoir, Van Gogh or Gauguin. This is because he never had to search for solutions in the work of other artists (he is not pretentious), but did so in his own environment, in the simple beings that surround him, in children (…), in daily things and chores’.[2]

In reality, in spite of his lack of academic training, Volpi maintained close relationships with several artists and intellectuals during his lifetime and had the opportunity to see the work of many European masters in exhibitions that took place in São Paulo from the 1930s onwards. It seems fair to suppose that Volpi’s reputation as a naive or outsider artist still weighs heavily against his recognition on an international level, as if his highly sophisticated contribution to modern painting were the result of a purely intuitive mind. More recently, such contemporary commentators of Volpi’s work as São Paulo critic Rodrigo Naves have attempted to demonstrate how ‘Volpi’s persona masks’ the fact that the combination of artisanal making and geometric structure in his work was achieved ‘through a very peculiar incorporation of the whole of the modern tradition.’[1]