Accession Number
1997/1.104

Title
La Vittoria

Artist(s)
Jean Tinguely

Artist Nationality
Swiss

Object Creation Date
1970

Medium & Support
graphite and felt tip pen on paper

Dimensions
18 3/4 in x 25 7/16 in (47.7 cm x 64.6 cm)

Credit Line
Gift of the Lannan Foundation in Honor of the Pelham Family

Subject matter
This preliminary drawing for the large, phallic-like sturcture was created by Tinguely for a tenth-anniversay festival of the "Nouveaux Réalistes."  La Vittoria was a kinetic sculpture unvieled in front of the Milan Cathedral, which culminated in its self-destruction in a blaze of smoke and fireworks. This kinetic sculpture harked back to his earlier "Hommage à New York" (March 18, 1960, MoMA). Like with this work, the Swiss artist is most recognized for his kinetic sculptural machines, which often included functional elements like automated drawing, self-destruction, and other mechanical operations. For La Vittoria, Tinguely's designs reveal how the phallic structure would be revealed from an outer scaffolding during the kinetic performance. He included notes and measurements to show this structure, in both a frontal and profile view.
The subject of this work is a canonical one, but Tinguely takes it to an absurd end by replacing the typical winged-woman, victory anthropomorphized, and making it a giant gold phallus. Making a joke, he pokes fun at the hypermasculinized triumphant Modernism of the immediate postwar , as exemplified by Abstract Expressionism.

Physical Description
This preparatory drawing for a sculpture has two drawings, side-by-side, of a vertical structure that has a dome-shaped top. The structures sit on top of boxes with diagonal lines running through them. On the right, the drawing has directional arrows pointing from bottom to top and over the structure from right to left. On the sides of the two drawings are handwritten notes in gold ink. The drawing is titled, located and dated (l.c.) " "La Vittoria" Milano 1970 (26 Nov.)" in gold pen and signed in pencil (l.r.) "Jean Tingeuly.".

Primary Object Classification
Drawing

Primary Object Type
preparatory drawing

Collection Area
Modern and Contemporary

Rights
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Keywords
Kinetic (style)
abstraction
diagrams
machines (general equipment)
modern and contemporary art
phallic
preliminary drawings (drawings)
public sculpture
sculpture (visual works)