The art dealer Emmanuel Di Donna opens his new purpose-designed 6,500 sq. ft gallery today at 744 Madison Avenue in Manhattan with the show, Paths to the Absolute (13 October–3 December), featuring 13 paintings by seven artists from the European and American avant-gardes: Vassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still. Di Donna, formerly the worldwide head of Sotheby’s Impressionism and Modern art department, says he took his inspiration for the show from the painter and art historian John Golding’s 2000 book of the same title, which traced each artist’s spiritual and intellectual route to his unique brand of abstraction. “I thought it would be a phenomenal exhibition if you could assemble all those pioneers of abstraction in a few rooms.”
The works, all on loan, range in date from Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematism, 18th Construction (1915)—among the last major works by Malevich in private hands, Di Donna notes—to Barnett Newman’s orange Triad (1965). The show features three works by Rothko, including the unusual No. 1 (1949), a visible hinge between the artist's Cubist-inflected early output and his most fully realised color-field arias.
All seven artists, he adds, “had a specific language, a unique voice,” and the works are certainly in conversation on and across the walls. “I love the pairing of the 1916 Malevich and the 1965 Newman,” says Di Donna. “Some 50 years separate them, but they are both radical and fresh. The Malevich is 100 years old and is just such a stunning, Modern painting.”
Joining the growing club of commercial dealers who have mounted non-selling exhibitions of museum-quality works as a statement of market muscle, Di Donna admits to having played a role in helping some of the works’ owners—who include Marsha and Jeffrey Perelman and Louise and Leonard Riggio—acquire their paintings, and attributes diligent research and good connections for the rest. At half a billion dollars’ worth of art concentrated in three rooms, the works certainly make a statement. But how will he follow up on such a blockbuster collection? Di Donna says his next show will be dedicated to the movement in which he specialises, Surrealism.
