“Ripping posters off walls is the only possible retaliation, the only possible form of protest against a society that has lost its taste for change and breathtaking transformations. I glue on the posters, then I rip them, creating new, unpredictable forms.”

After moving to Rome in the mid- 1940s, Mimmo Rotella was drawn to the most cutting-edge expressions of abstract art in the city, making contact with the artists in the Forma group. In 1947, he displayed his work at the Art Club, Rome, while in 1951 he held his first solo show at the Galleria Chiurazzi, presenting abstract/ geometric paintings, and participated in the major exhibition Arte astratta e concreta in Italia at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, curated by Palma Bucarelli and Giulio Carlo Argan and promoted by the Art Club and L’Age d’Or. The same year, he won a Fulbright Scholarship to study at the University of Kansas, remaining there until summer 1952. Back in Rome, between 1953 and 1954 he began producing his series of décollages, which he displayed for the first time in April 1955 in I Sette pittori sul Tevere a Ponte Santangelo exhibition curated by Emilio Villa, an eccentric yet brilliant leading figure on the Roman art and culture scene. In 1957, the artist explained: “Ripping posters off walls is the only possible retaliation, the only possible form of protest against a society that has lost its taste for change and breathtaking transformations. I glue on the posters, then I rip them, creating new, unpredictable forms.”¹ With décollage, Rotella abandoned painting in favour of working with posters found on the street, using an approach that drew on the collage tradition of the early avant-gardes, Enrico Prampolini’s polymaterialism and, especially in the case of the retro d’affiches, Alberto Burri’s Sacchi (Sacks), albeit reinterpreted from a different angle: softening the existential aspects of Burri’s work and creating surfaces by layering traces and signs taken from the streets. Using décollage, Rotella opened up the artwork to the space and time of city life, an aspect that made his work of critical importance to the subsequent generation of artists linked to the Scuola di Piazza del Popolo and Plinio De Martiis’s Galleria La Tartaruga. While the artist’s attention was still focused on the material aspect of the surface in the 1950s, his interest shifted in the following decade to the new mythology of the economic boom, made up of advertising slogans, consumer goods and film stars. This was particularly apparent in the works he showed in 1962 in his first solo exhibition at the Galerie J in Paris, Cinecittà, curated by Pierre Restany. As the artist explained: “The world of extremely violent images that surrounds us (road signs, billboards, posters, traffic lights, colourful cars, advertising) cannot help but strike the painter’s eye and imagination, beyond all figurative pretext in the traditional sense.”² This awareness filled Rotella with an urgent need to draw on modern icons and film stars as material for his work. In the early 1960s, Marilyn Monroe, the quintessential film star, became a recurrent subject in his work, featuring in pieces like La vedette du rythme (The Star of Rhythm) and The Hot Marilyn, both from 1962. “A ripped Marilyn”, Angela Vettese observed, “is always a Marilyn, but unlike an image fresh from the printer, it shows a woman with experience, one who has been consumed by eyes and attention and who has lost the initial, monumental completeness that she had, by design, in the original poster.”³ After the actress’s premature death in 1962, the group show Homage to Marilyn Monroe was held in her honour in 1967 at the Sidney Janis Gallery, New York. In addition to Rotella’s décollages, the exhibition included works by some of the most important exponents of New Dada, the Independent Group, Pop Art and Nouveau Réalisme, including Arman, Peter Blake, John Chamberlain, Joseph Cornell, Richard Hamilton, Robert Indiana, Allen Jones, Marisol, Claes Oldenburg, Peter Phillips, Eduardo Paolozzi, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, George Segal, Andy Warhol and Tom Wesselmann. For the décollage in the Cerruti Collection, dated 2004 and purchased in May 2007 from the Galerie LC, Paris, Rotella used the poster for Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (1959), starring Marilyn Monroe, Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis, returning to one of his preferred themes, repeatedly explored in works produced over the course of his entire career. 

Raffaella Perna

¹ M. Rotella, in Rome 1957, np.

² M. Rotella, in L’Aquila 1962, p. 42.

³ A. Vettese, “Quando brillavano le stelle”, in Vettese 2002, p. 13.