Cuadernos de música

One of the founders of Argentinian modernism, Emilio Pettoruti was twenty-one years old when he left Buenos Aires with a scholarship to study art in Florence. During a long sojourn in Italy, which lasted from 1913 until 1924, he studied the work of the Old Masters and participated in group exhibitions associated with the launch of the Italian avant-garde. His work has been characterized as an idiosyncratic synthesis of Cubism and Futurism, often showing a dynamic arrangement of spatial geometric planes that suggests objects in motion. Pettoruti produced several ink drawings on paper between 1918 and 1919 after his arrival to Milan, where he became involved with the artistic movement known as the "Novecento Italiano", with which he shared an interest in classicism. The objects in "Cuadernos de música" appear as a continuation of the space and decorative elements around them. This effect grants the work a graphic quality as the two-dimensionality of the work flattens material surfaces while simultaneously imbuing them with the immaterial presence of light.

Text credit: Produced in collaboration with the University of Maryland Department of Art History & Archaeology and Patricia Ortega-Miranda.