Notes

Strauss & Co is particularly fortunate to be presenting on the July 2020 auction a wonderful selection of sculptures by the master sculptor Edoardo Villa. Among these are two outstanding large scale works both bearing the title, Mother and Child. Lot 442 is a 490cm high painted tubular steel sculpture produced in 1974, considered to be one of the most significant Villas to come to auction, and the present lot, a magnificent Mother and Child bronze cast by Luigi Gamberini at the Vignali Foundry in 1983.

The present lot, a bronze Mother and Child, a more angular version, was cast in the same year that Villa completed another somewhat larger bronze of the same title that was destined for the gardens of the Durban Art Gallery. When the latter was installed Andrew Verster, with glowing appreciation, described the bronze as ‘Quiet, dignified, elegant and loving. A simple column, its tallness gives it a spiritual presence that lifts it above the mundane’.1 It is remarkable how in both these bronzes the child is so lovingly swaddled in the arms of her mother that only the head of the child is visible.

Italian born Villa was interned as a prisoner of war from 1942 to 1946 at Zonderwater prison of war camp, but even during this time he assiduously pursued his interest in art. Esmé Berman remarked that, ‘his devoted study of the bronzes of Auguste Rodin heightened his appreciation of the place of light on surfaces and the role of hollows and projections in affirming the vitality of the sculpted object.’² Once liberated, the young Villa was eager to nourish his vision in the freedom of his adopted country and he perceptively absorbed local influences while keeping a keen eye on international artistic developments, such as those of European modernists Constantin Brâncu?i and Jean Arp.

1. Amalie von Maltitz and Karel Nel (2005) ‘Edoardo Villa, A Life Considered’, in Karel Nel, Elizabeth Burroughs and Amalie von Maltitz (eds), Villa at 90, Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball with Shelf Publishing, page 82.

2. Esmé Berman (2005) ‘Foreword’, in Karel Nel, Elizabeth Burroughs and Amalie von Maltitz (eds), Villa at 90, Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball with Shelf Publishing, page 2.