Enrico Donati, 99; sculptor considered last of Surrealists

Born in Italy, Enrico Donati moved to the United States and worked in several art styles, including Surrealism, Constructivism, and Abstract Expressionism. (weinstein gallery/file 1946)

NEW YORK - Enrico Donati, an Italian-born American painter and sculptor considered by many in the art world to be the last of the Surrealists, died Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 99.

The cause of death was complications of injuries sustained in a taxi accident in July, said David Oxman, a family spokesman.

Mr. Donati survived Surrealism and moved through other art movements, including Constructivism and Abstract Expressionism, and became a successful owner of a perfume company.

After receiving a doctorate in what would now be called sociology at the University of Pavia in 1929, he first turned to music. Unhappy with the state of musical education in Milan under the Fascists, he moved to Paris and for a time composed avant-garde music. He developed an interest in anthropology and in 1934 traveled to the American Southwest to collect American Indian artifacts.

After dabbling in commercial art and printing in New York, he resolved to commit himself to painting and returned to Paris, where he was drawn to the flourishing Surrealist movement.

When war broke out in 1939, Mr. Donati returned to New York for good.

Mr. Donati attended the New School for Social Research and in 1942 had his first one-man show at the New School's gallery. His work impressed the art historian Lionello Venturi, who introduced him to the writer André Breton, often considered the father of Surrealism. Breton brought Mr. Donati into the circle of prominent European artists, many of them Surrealists, who had gathered in New York at the outset of the war.

"You are one of us," he recalled Breton saying to him. The group included Max Ernst, Salvador Dali, Yves Tanguy, Arshile Gorky, Marcel Duchamp, and sculptor Alexander Calder.

"We met for lunch every day at Larre's French restaurant on West 56th Street," Mr. Donati later said.

Duchamp became a particular friend. They collaborated on various projects, including the Exposition Internationale du Surrealisme at the Maeght Gallery in Paris in 1947.

At Mr. Donati's death, he was the only survivor of the group.

As Surrealism faded, Mr. Donati moved on. "He reinvented himself four or five times," said his biographer, the artist and critic Theodore F. Wolff.