INV. No 51
Jobless
1968
ON PAPER
MATERIALS: Tempera and collage on paper
DIMENSIONS: Collage: 18.5 × 20 cm
Passe-partout: 71.5 × 51.5 cm
INSCRIPTIONS: Signed and dated on the verso, middle: ‘Fabio Mauri 1967’
PROVENANCE: The artist; Tatina Demby, Consuma Pelago (Florence)
COLLECTION: William Demby and Lucia Drudi Demby archive, Florence
CATALOGUE: C_1968_51
NOTE:

Collage on paper in which Mauri deconstructs and reprocesses an image from William Wellman’s film Heroes for Sale (1933), about the Great Depression in 1930s America. In the background, we see a Chamber of Commerce notice printed on large street posters, declaring its helplessness in the face of the desperate mass unemployment created by the 1929 crisis: ‘Jobless men keep going, we cannot take care of our own.’ Mauri intervened in the photo, colouring and shading certain details, covering over part of the message with an advertising graphic featuring the three women’s bodies in bras and miniskirts. A cut-out of an austere Richard Barthelmess in the foreground symbolises the plight of the unemployed, in counterpoint to the glossy joie de vivre of the consumer society beginning to take hold at that time.


Exhibitions:

1969, Rome, Studio d’Arte Toninelli, Fabio Mauri 1959-1969, opening 1 July, curated by Cesare Vivaldi.


Bibliography:

Fabio Mauri, exhibition catalogue, Studio d’Arte Toninelli, Rome, edited by Cesare Vivaldi (Rome: Studio d’Arte Toninelli, 1969), p. 97 (ill.).

Fabio Mauri. Opere e Azioni 1954-1994, exhibition catalogue, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome, edited by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Marcella Cossu (Milan / Rome: Editoriale Giorgio Mondadori / Carte Segrete, 1994), p. 77 (ill.).

Fabio Mauri,
Scritti in mostra. L’avanguardia come zona 1958-2008, edited by Francesca Alfano Miglietti (Milan: il Saggiatore, 2008), p. 286 (ill.).


Jobless, 1968