Image of Time (Barrier) (Immagine del tempo [Sbarramento]), 1951. Egg tempera on canvas, 51 3/8 x 67 1/8 inches (130.5 x 170.4 cm). The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation,Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice  76.2553.162

Emilio Vedova’s work has antecedents in the long tradition of dynamic expression that has existed in Italian art since Tintoretto. Like the Futurists, Vedova sees his work as a response to contemporary social upheavals. Though he shares the emotional pitch of the Futurists, his political position is antithetical to theirs. While they romantically celebrated the aggressive energies of societal conflict, Vedova in his feverish, violent canvases conveys in abstract terms his horror and moral protestation in the face of man’s assault on his own kind.

Vedova expressed a political consciousness in his work for the first time during the late 1930s, when his works were inspired by the Spanish Civil War. His continuing commitment to social issues gave rise to series such as Cycle of Protest and Image of Time, initiated during the first years of the 1950s. Although the generating impulse of this turbulent painting is political, its formal preoccupations parallel those of the American Abstract Expressionists Jackson Pollock and, above all, Franz Kline. The drama of the angular, graphic slashes of black on white is heightened with accents of orange-red. Occupying a shallow space, pictorial elements are locked together in formal combat and emotional turmoil.

Lucy Flint