Enrico Donati

Enrico Donati (1909–2008) was an Italian-born painter and one of the last major figures associated with American Surrealism. Throughout his long career, Donati maintained a deep fascination with surface and texture, frequently incorporating unconventional materials into his paintings, including sand, dust, coffee grounds, and even the contents of his vacuum cleaner, which he mixed with pigment and glue to create richly tactile surfaces. His experimental approach bears strong affinities with the material explorations of Jean Dubuffet.

Donati became an integral member of the vibrant community of expatriate and American artists active in the postwar New York art scene. Introduced by the writer and “Father of Surrealism,” André Breton, he entered a circle that included Arshile Gorky, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Yves Tanguy, Giorgio de Chirico, Fernand Léger, and the American sculptor Alexander Calder. Duchamp became a particularly close friend and collaborator. Together they worked on several projects, most notably the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme at the Maeght Gallery in Paris in 1947, for which they devised the exhibition program, decorating each cover with a foam rubber breast.

Over the course of a six-decade career, Donati continually reinvented his artistic language. While rooted in Surrealism, his work later engaged with the energy and scale of Abstract Expressionism, and he exhibited alongside leading figures of the New York School, including Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning.