by Roberta Smith

Alberto Burri's prescient paintings — in patched, burned and otherwise abused burlap, plastic or wood — form a lavish, beautiful and admirable, if sometimes monotonous retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum. It presents an artist who is impressive less for the profundity of his work than for his consistency and his ideas, which remain very much alive even among young artists not familiar with his work.

In a dazzlingly researched, often eloquent catalog essay, Emily Braun, an art historian who oversaw the Guggenheim show,"Alberto Burri: The Trauma of Painting"(and is also curator of the Leonard A. Lauder Collection of Cubist Art), argues that Burri's art is a crucial, underacknowledged link in the development of collage and assemblage and helped set the stage for a host of postwar art movements — Neo-Dada, Process Art, Arte Povera and more.

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Source: http://www.nytimes.com/