http://news.independent.co.uk/people/obituaries/article2145119.ece
Toni del Renzio - Enfant terrible of English Surrealism
Published: 12 January 2007
Antonino Romanov del Renzio dei Rossi di Castellone e Venosa (Toni del Renzio),
painter, art historian and writer: born Tsarskoe Selo, Russia 15 April 1915;
married 1943 Ithell Colquhoun (died 1988; marriage dissolved 1947), 1970 Doris
Miller (two sons, two daughters); died Margate, Kent 7 January 2007.
Toni del Renzio was the last of the pre-Second World War members of the
Surrealist group in England. He was also the enfant terrible of the movement,
clashing furiously with its intellectual leader E.L.T. Mesens.
The ancestry of Antonino Romanov del Renzio dei Rossi di Castellone e Venosa
goes back to the Russian Tsars. Born in 1915 in Tsarskoe Selo, he was barely
two when the 1917 Russian Revolution forced his aristocratic family to flee for
their lives, first to Yalta and then to Italy. After a schooling split between
Switzerland and Britain, he went to universities in the United States and Italy
and graduated in philosophy and mathematics.
As a student he had mingled in artistic circles - the latter-day Futurists, the
Milan Abstractionists, the Movement for Rational Architecture. But creativity
came to an abrupt end in 1935 when Toni del Renzio, as he had chosen to call
himself, was conscripted into Mussolini's Tripolitan cavalry and packed off to
fight in Abyssinia. To his horror, he discovered that the Abyssinians castrated
their prisoners and he decided to abscond.
Disguised as a Bedouin Arab, he joined a camel caravan and fled across the
North African desert. From Morocco he reached Spain, just as the civil war was
breaking out. He took up arms against Franco and fought first in the Barcelona
streets and then on the Aragon front. War-weary, he set off again and reached
Paris in 1937.
There he worked as a designer and painter, mainly for theatres and ballet
companies, and became immersed in a vibrant European avant-garde, frequenting
Picasso and the Surrealists. He began painting in earnest, producing delicately
coloured theatrical illusions inspired by the stage and dance. But, as Hitler
was drawing closer to the French frontier in 1939, del Renzio took flight
across the Channel.
During the Second World War, he was enlisted in "reserved" work connected with
the Allies, including General Charles de Gaulle's Free French fighters, for
whom del Renzio designed and co- ordinated a travelling exhibition. As
everywhere else in Europe, the Surrealist movement in Britain was in tatters
and, by 1941, it had come to a complete standstill. Roland Penrose, its chief
founder, had become a captain in the Home Guard and camouflage designer of
dubious merit, S.W. Hayter, Gordon Onslow-Ford and Sam Haile had all left for
the United States, F.E. McWilliam had joined the Royal Air Force and E.L.T.
Mesens had closed the London Gallery, the nerve centre for Surrealism in
Britain, stopped publishing London Bulletin, the British Surrealist mouthpiece,
and gone to work for the BBC broadcasting Allied propaganda.
Del Renzio decided to take the bull by the horns and revive the ailing
movement. "War or no war, there was nothing being done about Surrealism. Hitler
had to be defeated, yes, but Surrealism also had to carry on." In March 1942 he
published a single-issue magazine entitled Arson, "to provoke authentic
collective Surrealist activity", and within months he organised an important
Surrealist exhibition at the International Arts Centre in Bayswater.
Seen as the movement's driving force, del Renzio was approached by the editors
of New Road, John Bayliss and Alex Comfort, to compile a Surrealist anthology
in 1943. Once it was published, a further offer came from Cyril Connolly's
Horizon, for which del Renzio was to have edited a whole number. But all this
was too much for Mesens, who was enraged that his leadership had been usurped.
Unable to contain his anger, he scuppered the Horizon project and viciously
attacked del Renzio in the press.
By 1944, all the Surrealists, other than Ithell Colquhoun, to whom del Renzio
was by then married, had abandoned him. They even sabotaged a recitation of his
poetry at the International Arts Centre by showering the stage with rotten
eggs. Despite the hate conspiracy, no one could deny that, without del Renzio,
Surrealism would not have existed during the war.
Del Renzio resumed freelance design activities, as well taking up a teaching
post at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts. He designed the magazine Polemic
and books for Pilot Press. He also did advertisement mock-ups which appeared in
Graphis, Penrose Annual and Design in Britain. In 1948 he was appointed art
director of the National Trade Press (NTP) . He also became involved with the
English Constructivist scene.
The 1951 Festival of Britain approached him and drew on his "graphic" talents
and he was asked to design a series of panels on the evolution of domestic
kitchen machinery, a boom area at the time. But del Renzio yearned for more
involvement in the finer arts and resigned from the NTP to go to Italy to study
the latest trends of the Modern movement in architecture. On his return he
joined the Institute of Contemporary Arts, then in Dover Street, as director's
assistant.
He was in the perfect milieu for an artist: in 1952, together with the artists
Richard Hamilton, Nigel Henderson, John McHale, Eduardo Paolozzi and William
Turnbull, and the architects and critics Reyner Banham and Lawrence Alloway, he
founded the experimental Independent Group, an "art of discussion, design and
display". Its celebrated achievement was the exhibition "This is Tomorrow",
which was opened in 1956 at the Whitechapel Gallery by a 12ft-tall Hollywood
celebrity, Robbie the Robot, who was then starring in MGM's Forbidden Planet.
"This is Tomorrow" emerged as a turning point of British art, with its fusion
of popular culture and orthodox abstract art, "high" and "low" art, ideology
and technology.
Then, an approach from Newnes and Pearson's women's magazine group whisked del
Renzio into the world of fashion publishing. In 1957 he was special
correspondent to The Times in France and Italy, but in 1958 joined Harper's
Bazaar as art director, acting too as design consultant to Encounter and
French, German and Italian magazines, as well as contributing to Lilliput and
Flair. In 1961 he was appointed designer at Topic, but within weeks was
transferred to Paris as its correspondent. From there he also contributed to
Apollo and undertook research at an experimental French television centre,
working on aesthetics and the theory of games. A new challenge, transforming
worked as a journalist for Time-Life, writing essays on Italian art,
architecture, design and film, as well as carrying out extensive research for
books on Leonardo and Marcel Duchamp.
By 1965 he worked increasingly in film and television. Besides designing titles
and credits and making advertisements, he wrote scripts and dialogue, directed
films and documentaries and even acted, notably in spaghetti westerns.
In 1967 and 1968 del Renzio visited California to lecture on art and media at
Berkeley and Santa Cruz. There he witnessed the San Francisco hippie explosion
at first hand, recounting his experiences in his 1969 book The Flower Children.
Back in the UK, he continued to lecture at art colleges, including the Chelsea
School of Art, the Courtauld Institute and Bath Academy of Art at Corsham,
where he met his Estonian wife-to-be Doris Miller. From 1975 to 1980, he was
head of the Art History department at Canterbury College of Art. In 1981, he
took the post of Director of the British Studies Centre of the Institute for
American Universities, his final administrative role. From then on, as well as
fathering quads at the age of 70, he concentrated on his painting and collage,
becoming increasingly innovative as the years passed.
At the same time, he restarted to publish Surrealist manifestos and polemical
presses as he lay on his deathbed.
Silvano Levy
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