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The Two Worlds of Louis Monza

Mastering such media as oil painting, drawing, printmaking and terra cotta sculpture, Louis Monza was a prolific and wide ranging American master. In his outlook and in his concerns, which were so clearly reflected in his artwork, Monza was indeed ‘American’, but his roots were unmistakably established in the old world.

Louis Monza was born in 1897 in Turate, Italy, a town about 15 miles from Milan. This region was at the time a major European center for the art of furniture making. Turate, however, was far enough off of the beaten path to still produce furniture in the traditional manner that had been practiced for hundreds of years.

Monza was apprenticed to a local master furniture carver at the age of 7. In the time honored way, the boy learned his craft slowly and completely, mastering every process and chore in the studio. While more modern centers of production had by this time begun to departmentalize the production process, with the creative work being performed by professional designers, and the craft processes by laborers, this was not the case in the studio that Monza grew up in. Here he was taught to be a craftsman, a designer, and an artist, producing finished works that were entirely his own.

Over the course of this traditional education Monza was exposed to a vocabulary of decorative and symbolic elements which were derived from many cultures and eras. Within his workshop were pattern books that had grown fat with the slow accretions of centuries. Monza studied these and made his own additions to them as many others had before him.

Monza also benefitted from the rich artistic heritage that surrounded him. Besides taking in the art and architecture of Turate and Milan, he traveled extensively throughout Western Europe both with and without his master.

At the age of 16, when he finished with these journeyman travels, Monza decided to come to America. Never able to find work as a furniture maker, he continued to travel, and took jobs which allowed him to see many parts of the United States and Mexico, a country which he fell in love with. It wasn’t until he sustained a spinal injury in 1937, and was unable to pursue the sort of labor he had become accustomed to, that he turned to the production of art. He found a fair degree of early success, and such figures as John Dewey and Sidney Janis were among those who encouraged his career in those early years.

A common theme for him throughout the 1940’s and 50’s was the threat of destruction which loomed over the world of man and which emanated from his own hands. This is perhaps not surprising given the realities of World War II, which must have affected Monza on two fronts. He was concerned not only with the Allied cause, but also with the ravages being endured by the land and people of his birth.

Monza often couched his social concerns in allegorical images. A Scavenger Bird Behind a Nude, an oil dating from 1946, reflects some of his feelings during the war. A stone faced nude woman stands before a huge vulture-like bird, their limbs entwined around and embracing each other. She is completely vulnerable. Unclothed, far from the shelter of the village buildings in the background, pressed as close as could be against the body of the bird who could deal out death at will, she seems to have come to terms with the inevitability of her fate, whatever that might turn out to be.

In the period just after the war, Monza’s focus seemed to shift from threats harrowing the individual to the crumbling infrastructure of society. The largest and most ambitious linoleum cut Monza ever produced was The Comic Tragedy of 1962. The disintegration of church and state, their ruins lying in a pile, can be seen in the lower central portion of the image. Even as the wild animals begin to pick through the detritus, new players move in along the edges, setting up monuments to their own power. As they approach the image’s center, even the new figures start to slip and fall. It is an endless parade of jokers who wield their power, set up their houses of cards, and then have them fall to ruin.

Ruin emanating from within our own society found company in Monza’s art with ruin coming from the outside. This sort of Cold War Era siege mentality found expression in images like 1956’s Land of Figures. An uneasy watchfulness pervades this image. A fortified garrison full of armed figures seemingly springs from the landscape. These figures keep watch on the hills in the background, and with good reason. The anthropomorphized hills look back. Faces and eyes are everywhere. A sense of silence hangs over all, but it is a pregnant silence, promising turmoil to come.

In the 60’s and 70’s, up to his death in 1984, Monza’s art took on a more hopeful, almost utopian cast. Reflecting the spirit of the age, his art extolled the healing power of nature and promoted as an ideal the idea of a new order, with man and nature united in harmony. This went far beyond a mere ‘back to nature’ movement, something which Monza had embraced as far back as the 50’s in works like The Hidden Valley Cabins, 1958 and The Chicken House from 1956, or The Farm House of 1960. In the newer works man displays a real partnership with nature, often producing hybrid forms, rather than simply controlling nature, albeit in a bucolic manner.

A Man with Double Birds, 1963, A Place in the Universe, 1968 and The Big Birdies, 1970 all depict this new order, with human and other natural forms being shuffled and reassembled into something greater than their parts. The rondo format of A Place in the Universe, with its hybrid figures fitted into every inch like puzzle pieces, seems to suggest that this is a global realignment.

While images such as Ground Hug, 1970 and Ecology, 1971 hint at the implications of man’s new relationship with the natural world, Climbing Over, 1968 is somewhat more explicit about the nature of that new relationship. A shamanic figure hovers in the mouth of a grotto which seems to be formed by the body of a vast serpent. Two men approach the grotto from the right, where they find themselves not only at the mouth of the cave, but also at the mouth of the serpent. It is unclear which they will be asked to pass through, but once they have the effect will be liberating, as illustrated by the acrobatically cavorting couple seen on the left. Monza tells us that man will have to experience a rebirth from the earth in order to usher in the new age.

An anti-clerical sense had pervaded Monza’s images from the beginning, reflecting personal feelings which probably went back to his boyhood in Italy. It is still visible in 1983, in a drawing entitled The Castle of Mont Falcone. The ‘castle’ depicted is actually a church, but true to its billing it is portrayed more like an armed fortress than like a house of God. A nun stands sentinel in the main doorway, looking all but unmovable. A sidewalk stretches around the structure like a moat. More than a dozen steeples are massed on its roof like turrets, their crosses bristling above like weapons. But, consistent with the optimism of Monza’s latter era, all here is not bleak. Though the trees are leafless, they are brimming with life and movement, bespeaking the coming spring. The entire image is bathed in lush sunset colors lending it all a jewel-like radiance.

The duality of Monza’s art is difficult to ignore. He was a man with roots on two continents whose art clearly reflected the influences and concerns of each. His long working career straddled two distinct historic eras which left corresponding distinctions on his oeuvre. It is a testament to his skills as an artist, a storyteller and a visionary that he was able to navigate through these divergences in so seamless a manner.