Aldo Mondino (1938-2005)

This sprightly painting with collage by Aldo Mondino, executed across a vertical tripartite structure, depicts a tailored gentleman absorbed in the newspaper glued to the canvas. The work, painted in Paris and commissioned by Alain Jouffroy for the opening of the Paris-Moscou exhibition, has a curious origin: Mondino references the composition and subject of an eponymous work by Fauvist leader André Derain (executed between 1911 and 1914). This earlier portrait, with its encapsulation of Parisian café culture and resonance with contemporary interests in primitivism (the face of the sitter is reminiscent of a ritualistic mask), was cited by Picasso as the original collaged work of art. Derain’s piece was subsequently bought by André Breton in 1920 and later sold to a private collector. When Mondino sought to reinterpret the work in the late 1970s, he found that no existing reproduction of the painting existed, so pieced the visual source together by studying a variety of French avant-garde texts. The extraordinary result, which bears many similarities to Derain’s original, is a remarkable visual reconstruction produced using textual clues alone.