The Decomposition of a Bull

Right up to the threshold of the great turning point that was to occur in the figurative arts in Italy when, at the end of the Second World War, the nationalistic obstacles to a free circulation of ideas and international experiences fell away, Martini found his histrionic capacity intact: to anticipate, by instinct, every novelty, to destroy every fetish in order to point to paths not yet trodden; so much so that in practice there is no current form of expression that has not, in one way or another, had to reckon with Martini's experiments. Thus in a small group of sculptures modelled in 1943-44, especially those taking animal figures as their subject, having at a stroke gone beyond the “scientific” Cubist technique, he carried out a reconstruction of space in totally autonomous images, under the sign of a dramatic juxtaposition of abstract volumetric values.