The Battle
By the early 1950s Marca-Relli developed a technique of abstract collage, attaching biomorphically-shaped pieces of painted or dyed canvas to the surfaces of his pictures. While his fellow Abstract Expressionists in the Club on Eighth Street generally avoided representative subject matter in their work, Marca-Relli often evoked the tradition of Renaissance painting. In this work, he paraphrases the fifteenth-century painter Paolo Uccello's famous scenes commemorating Florence's victory over Siena in the Battle of San Romano in 1432, deliberately using a canvas of the same dimensions as those of the three Renaissance panels now found in the Louvre, the Uffizi, and the National Gallery, London.
Artwork Details
- Title: The Battle
- Artist: Conrad Marca-Relli (American, Boston, Massachusetts 1913–2000 Parma)
- Date: 1956
- Medium: Oil cloth, tinted canvas, enamel paint, and oil on canvas
- Dimensions: 71 1/8 in. × 131 3/16 in. × 1 1/4 in. (180.7 × 333.2 × 3.2 cm)
- Classification: Paintings
- Credit Line: Arthur Hoppock Hearn Fund, 1956
- Object Number: 56.203
- Curatorial Department: Modern and Contemporary Art
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