After the Masters

Although the majority of Dario Zucchi’s photographs employ strategies dependent on the decorative aspects of modern abstract art, some of the artist’s most deft pictorial analogies occur with representational paintings of the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries. Zucchi casts a wide net, hauling in artists as diverse as Gustave Caillebotte, Pablo Picasso, Thomas Eakins, Edvard Munch, Fernand Léger, and David Hockney. A representative example is the woman wearing the textured, multicolored scarf in front of Henri Rousseau’s iconic Sleeping Gypsy (fig. 001), a photograph from early in Zucchi’s career. This completely fortuitous matching of costume and painting is so compelling that it often evokes disbelief in his artistic practice--the artist is repeatedly asked if he selected the scarf and set up the photograph in advance. The idea of composing in advance is patently untrue in Zucchi’s method. The element of coincidental juxtaposition resides at the heart of his explorations, both for himself and for the viewers of his work. Zucchi has never indulged in the somewhat simplistic idea of identifying an outfit and then deliberately re-composing in the context of an art museum.

A striking Zucchi photograph (fig. 210) depicts a viewer in front of the monumental canvas of The Agnew Clinic painted by the American artist Thomas Eakins (1844-1916). The painting celebrates one of the greatest surgeons of the nineteenth-century and illustrates the rabid development of new surgical practices in the United States during Eakins’s lifetime. Zucchi adds a surprisingly relevant commentary to the issues addressed by the painter. Some feminist art historians have attempted to portray David Hayes Agnew as a misogynist, suggesting that the painting represents the systematic mutilation of women in front of a male audience. It seems unlikely that Eakins intended this interpretation. Although Agnew had a traditional view of women’s roles as more important in the domestic sphere, he encouraged the expanded role of nurses in the operating room and in hospitals. Zucchi’s female viewer --seemingly referred to by the doctor himself in the course of his post-operative remarks-- observes the operation closely. Her white jacket and hair fit seamlessly into the painting, reinforcing both the newfound importance of women in the operating room and the inherent sense of hygiene and cleanliness under the bright new Edison electric lights of the nineteenth-century operating room.

Picasso’s synthetic cubist masterpiece, The Three Musicians, provided Zucchi with an opportunity to turn the trio into a quartet with the addition of a fourth rhythmic figure (fig. 231). The hooded African-American youth looks avidly at the musical scores as he enters into the spirit of Picasso’s 1921 Commedia dell’arte troupe. In Zucchi’s interpretation the young man, wearing earbuds and holding a sheet of paper, is perhaps re-imagining the music that Pierrot, Harlequin, and the monk are playing.