‘ Achrome means no colour,’ Pennisi explains. In his Achromes, Manzoni overturned painting’s traditional conventions, seeking to liberate art from representation and narrative. With Lucio Fontana, Manzoni was one of the first post-war Italian artists to become popular with an international audience. Never before seen at auction, it was a highlight of the landmark retrospective of the artist at Milan’s Palazzo Reale in 2014.
#Achroma rising series
The work has also been well documented in all of the relevant literature since 1972, three years before Manzoni's first catalogue raisonné was published.’Įxecuted circa 1958, Achrome is one of the earliest works in Manzoni’s seminal series of the same name. The piece has essentially been with the same collector since 1976, and as I later learned, one of the collecting couple had actually met Manzoni himself.
‘I became more impressed as I learned more about its provenance. ‘I love the fact that there’s a real three-dimensionality to it,’ Pennisi continues. I fell in love with Italian art because of Manzoni, so finding this piece touched me very much.’ On 11 April, Achrome achieved the highest ever price for a Post-War work sold at auction in Italy when it sold for €2,970,000 in Christie’s Milan Modern and Contemporary Art sale. ‘When I started as a specialist nearly two decades ago, the white, immaculate Manzoni with folds in this shape was one of the works I dreamed about finding. ‘At first I couldn’t believe it,’ recalls Pennisi. In one corner, wrapped in a blanket, was this painting - Achrome, by Piero Manzoni. But I arrived at the clients’ house and immediately understood that I was dealing with very serious collectors with perfect taste they had chosen only the best of the best from each artist.’ It was sort of like a blind date: you don’t know what is going to happen. ‘I had been told only that the clients had acquired amazing works, but were very secretive. ‘When I went to the collector’s house to view this work, I had no idea what I was going to find,’ says Renato Pennisi, Christie’s Senior Specialist in Post-War and Contemporary Art in Italy.
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