Post War & Contemporary Art

Lot Note:

Italian mixed media artist Enrico Baj (Italian, 1924-2003) was introduced to an eager American audience and acclaim with his inclusion in Surrealist Intrusion in the Enchanter’s Domain, at D’Arcy Galleries, curated by Marcel Duchamp and Andre’ Breton, anointing him as the maverick torchbearer of Post-War Surrealism and Dadaism with this stamp of approval from the movement’s magnanimous luminaries. Baj’s series of absurdly combative and eclectic two-dimensional assemblage caricatures of military brass, informally known as Generals, dominated his output through the 1960s and endure as his most significant body of work. Often composed in classical portrait format, the Generals defied convention with their reckless calculatedly frivolous material choices, incorporating collaged flourishes of commercial textile passementerie and decorative military regalia to bedeck his grotesque clownishly painted authoritarian subjects, all comically tragic emblems of martial folly. Arguably as heavy handed as the tactics of the despotic targets of his critique, Baj bluntly explained his inventive objects of overt antiwar commentary as being, “representations of power and stupid authority.”  Le Capitain Chapuis, c. 1966, depicts a captain in seemingly regal profile, a satirical over adornment of adhered rank stripes and garishly ribboned medals burden an ill-fitting jacket encasing the overfed officer’s frame. Efficiently conceptual and functional, these adhered found objects add a sophisticated variance in surface texture, while echoing the repurposed generic floral fabric background. Beyond the direct association to the brutal fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, the war monger’s distorted face and bald head allude to more sympathetic, yet cautionary fictional Italians Pagliacci and Pinocchio, grease painted an unnatural flat white, an idiot jester with a deceitful puppet’s engorged proboscis and a single lifeless green eye awkwardly confronting the viewer. More loathsome than frightening, yet morbidly alluring. Painted at the height of Baj’s most prominent period of production, Le Capitain Chapuis, c. 1966, has all the signature elements that define Baj’s Generals and is a prime example of the artist’s most central and lasting theme.