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Giocolieri e Cavallo, 1953 Gouache sur papier monté sur une toile 63 x 43 cm (24 x 17 in.). Signé au crayon et daté 1953 en bas à droite Provenance: Venu de la proproété de Marian Crown, 211 cpw New York Accompagné par un certificat d'authenticité issu de la fondation Marino Marini Pistoia Italie, 13 janvier 2012, no. 638 Giocolieri e Cavallo, 1953 gouache on paper mounted on canvas 63 x43 cm (24 x 17 in.) signed in pencil and dated ?1953' lower right PROVENANCE: From the Estate of Marian Crown, 211 CPW, NYC Accompanied by a certificate of authenticity issued by the Fondazione Marino Marini Pistoia (Italy), Jan. 13, 2012, number 638." Trained as a painter in Florence, Italian artist Marino Marini (1901-1980) was a renowned sculptor, painter, and graphic artist. In 1928 Marini traveled to Paris, where he developed a close association with fellow artists Henry Moore and Pablo Picasso Deeply affected by the suffering he witnessed growing up in war ravaged Italy, Marini favored celebratory subjects that reflected his optimistic view of the human spirit. His simple compositions are dominated by lively colors and the recurrent themes of horses, acrobats, and dancers- elements which comprise a personal symbolic vocabulary while evoking an immediate sense of transcendent joy. The theme of horses and riders in Marini's art derives from Etruscan sculpture. The newly excavated forms of ancient horseman exerted a strong influence on him and in time came to be synonymous with his work. "Here in Italy, the art of the past is part and parcel of our daily life in the present. We live among the monuments of the past. I, for instance, was born in Tuscany, where the rediscovery of Etruscan art in the past fifty years has been something of great importance and in contemporary local life" (Marini quoted in S. Hunter, Marino Marini The Sculpture, New- York, 1993,p. 16) In Giocolieri e Cavallo one can perceive a typical mark of playfulness which Marini associated with ancient festivals. In the quickly rendered bold forms of horse and two acrobats he captures the viewer's eye in the strong movement of the figures held in space on the background of a flat red rectangle. Marini searches in the painting to re-examine antiquity in terms of the modern, through his trademark of sculptural form, intense movement and vivid colors. This is undertaken in his beloved oil painting technique where he felt at ease and found his poetric vein "Painting is a vision of color. Painting means entertaining the poetry of fact; and in the process of its making the fact becomes true. In color, I looked for the beginning of each new idea. Whether one should call it painting or drawing, I do not know" (S. Hunter, Marino Marini The Sculpture, p. 37) Looking back to Etruscan sculptures of riders we can trace Marini's individual style. He takes the essential outline of the equestrian figure and like a sculptor draws in space the volumes the symbolical figures. In the action of drawing volumes in red and yellow colors he recreates the experience of everyday life and suffering, infusing them through intense movement with the vitality of ancient classical festivals as that of the famous Hellenic Panathenia. The figures might still recall, in the angular shapes, those of Picasso in the Guernica, but unlike them don't evocate in us fear but quite the opposite a sense of joyfulness. This is due to the fragmentation of form which ultimately derives from a cubist source, but it is to Futurist painting that we owe the depiction of the dynamic performance of bodies in motion. In a classical key one can see in this dynamism of bodies what art critic G. Caradente saw as a ?symbiotic' relation between horse and rider ?as though the artist would melt the two bodies into one to represent Nessus, the mythical centaur' representing the essence of the vitality of nature. (G. Caramdente in- Fondazione Marino Marini (ed.) Marino Marini Catalogue Raisonne of the Sculptures, Milan, 1998, pp. 12