Arturo Di Modica

c.1986: Arturo Di Modica and friends with his first abstract equine

Turn to the Equine
By Anthony Haden-Guest

Arturo Di Modica owned horses while he was in Florence and made various horse sculptures throughout his career. In this he is being true to a rich tradition, making it clear that the horse has not been made irrelevant by another mode of transport in which the Italian eye has been dominant: the motorcar. We could begin with the four famous bronze horses of St Mark’s, Venice, though they are actually copper and were probably made in 3rd century Greece, but horses which pace, race or rear through the Renaissance include masterworks by Andrea Mantegna, numerous sculptures by Andrea del Verocchio and Benozzo Gozzoli’s Procession of the Magi.

Curiously, one of the most storied equine artworks of all time is Gran Cavallo, the horse-that- never-was. This was the project of another Florentine, Leonardo da Vinci, who was commissioned in 1482 by Lodovico il Moro, the Duke of Milan, to sculpt the largest equine statue in the world as a memorial to his father. Da Vinci, who was notorious for never getting things done, made plenty of drawings and studies for Gran Cavallo but got no further along with it than a huge clay model. This attracted the attention of French soldiers who invaded Milan in 1499 and found it convenient for target practice.
Arturo Di Modica, Abstract Equine

Arturo Di Modica was rather more productive in terms of equine statuary. One of his earliest was the polished bronze horse that was installed in 1984 in Trump Tower on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue. This work moreover marked a significant formal development in his work. Those sculptures by Di Modica which survive from before that time – and he has destroyed a great deal of work, dissatisfied – are almost wholly executed in the language of pure abstraction. Figurative elements though are emerging in that bronze horse. Indeed they were whole lot too figurative for Ivana Trump, who approached Di Modica to observe that the equine genitalia were a bit too much in people’s faces when they got out of the elevator. Di Modica observed that he came up with a solution. “Okay, I am coming tomorrow with underwear for him,” he said. That ballsy horse, Di Modica recounted, was “very quickly sold”.
Il Cavallo (1988)
Lincoln Center
'Di Modica wrapped it in a red blanket, loaded it single-handedly onto the back of his brand new Ferrari and drove off to install'

- Anthony Haden-Guest

Di Modica had first demonstrated his instinct for harnessing media in the service of his art with that covert nocturnal drop of eight of his marble pieces on the stretch of Fifth Avenue outside Rockefeller Center. This strategy depends on a lively media and it had been originally put to effective art career use by James McNeill Whistler and Oscar Wilde during the intense Art-for-Art’s-Sake Aesthetic Movement in the late 19th century. So successfully did the aesthetes get their message across in London that Gilbert & Sullivan, theater maestros of the time, turned the movement into a musical comedy called Patience, and the producers sent Wilde, a fop with a strong handshake and quite a punch, to tour America before its New York opening. We need only contemplate the career trajectories of Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst and Banksy to see that creative self-promo has been an increasingly potent element in the art world ever since, and Arturo Di Modica plays a striking role in that story.
Di Modica’s first strike at Rockefeller Center had worked. And how. His second strike was tactically identical but differently intentioned, being motivated not by anger but by love. It involved another momentous horse sculpture, Il Cavallo - a new bronze, which he had scaled up from a 3ft model. On St Valentine’s Day 1985, just one year after its predecessor had been installed at Trump Tower, Di Modica wrapped it in a red blanket which had been lettered to read ‘BE MY VALENTINE N.Y LOVE AD’, loaded it single-handedly onto the back of his brand new Ferrari and drove off to install it, once again illegally, in front of the Lincoln Center, then explained that it was “a Valentine’s gift to all the people in New York who are in love.” A 3ft Il Cavallo was later sold to Pavarotti.
"Il Cavallo carried him directly up the track to his next and most important creation – Charging Bull"

-Anthony Haden-Guest

Di Modica likes to pack some meaning into his work and what creature is as loaded with multiple mythic meanings as the horse, stretching from Alexander the Great’s Bucephalus to Sleipnir, the eight-legged steed of the Norse god, Odin and the pale horse ridden by Death, the Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse in the Book of Revelation? Well, the bull must come close, I think, which prompts an observation. Di Modica’s horse of 1984, installed in Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, has its head lowered to less than a foot from the ground or turf, should the animal be racing. The 1985 horse at Lincoln Center, a spectacularly muscled animal, has its neck and head straight up and slightly bent backwards, reaching the long whiplash of the tail. The sculpture, which seems at once naturalistic and unnaturally charged with energy, was quick to become widely popular. A huge confidence booster for the artist, Il Cavallo carried him directly up the track to his next and most important creation – Charging Bull.