Enrico Donati: One of the last Surrealist artists

Enrico Donati was one of the last of the generation of Surrealist artists who were active in the 1930s and 1940s, grouped around the "pope" of the movement, André Breton. Breton much admired Donati's work, writing in the preface to an early exhibition catalogue, "I love the paintings of Enrico Donati as I love a night in May".

Donati was born in Milan in 1909. His higher education was in the field of sociology, in which he obtained a doctorate from the University of Pavia, a step he took, as he put it, to "make the family happy". His real interest lay in music and art, which took him to Montmartre, Paris, in the early 1930s. Although his moves into the world of music at this time, as an avant-garde composer, found little success, he was able to pursue formal art training at the Ecole de la rue de Berri, a course he described as "very academic" but which provided him with the requisite know-how for his artistic career.

At the outbreak of war in 1939 Donati and his young family left Europe for the United States. He had first visited in 1934 as a tourist, fascinated by the art of the Native Americans, having seen pieces in the Milan natural history museum. This time he came as a fledgling artist in his own right, establishing his home in New York and soon mixing with others who had fled Europe.

In 1942 Donati had his first one-man show at the gallery of the New School for Social Research, where he was studying. That same year, Donati met both Marcel Duchamp, who had formerly been involved with the Dada movement, and André Breton, who had arrived from Paris the previous year. Although Donati's work soon moved away from orthodox Surrealism, the friendships with both men would continue for the rest of their lives.

Duchamp is perhaps best known for his 1917 "ready-made" work Fountain, based on a urinal. Working with Duchamp, Donati continued to offend and/or amuse the public of the time, in designing window-displays to promote the work of fellow artists. For example, an installation for Arcane 17 (1945) at the Gotham Book Mart in New York featured Breton's latest book in the hands of a headless mannequin whose thigh carried a tap from which urine flowed, like a fountain. The same display had earlier been on show for just a few hours at Brentano's bookshop on Fifth Avenue, before it was removed following protestations from passers-by.

Likewise, a catalogue, designed by Donati and Duchamp for "Le Surréalisme en 1947" at the Galerie Maeght in Paris, was designed to shock. It carried the instruction "Prière de toucher" ("Please touch") and bore a foam prosthetic breast attached to a velvet background, presented like a door-bell. Donati showed two sculptures, Fist (1946) and The Evil Eye (1947), and a painting at this exhibition. The catalogue with Duchamp would later feature in the show "Surrealism – Desire Unbound" at Tate Modern in 2001.

Donati's oil paintings of the early and mid 1940s are primarily figurative, consisting of anthropomorphic and zoomorphic forms on barren, desert-like backdrops, inspired perhaps by the works of Yves Tanguy, with whom Donati had become friends.

Around 1948 Donati developed what he called "molecular painting". Here the basic ingredients of paint and turpentine were poured onto the canvas and mixed with sand, coffee grains and – somewhat later – vacuum cleaner dust. The addition of these solids gave both significant texture and a certain three-dimensional character to work whose content by now was very much more abstract. The textured quality was apparently so pronounced that one work, Black Ice (1952), exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum in 1954 had to be guarded from visitors who wanted to pick away at its surface with their fingers.

Donati's talents were not limited to painting and sculpture. In 1959 he designed a perfume bottle for the relaunch of the fragrance Fougère Royale by Houbigant. The perfumier, established in the 18th century, was at the time owned by his wife's family. In the mid 1960s Donati bought the company outright and had by 1978 seen the company revived and valued at $50m.

In addition to his business involvement, Donati was also a visiting lecturer at Yale University from 1960 to 1962 and became a member of the university's Council for the Arts and Architecture until 1972.

From the 1960s Donati's work again changed in style, tending towards a variety of brighter colours, with both abstract and figurative subjects, inspired by nature and based on the themes of life, death and rebirth. This later period seems to have been influenced by his finding, in 1949, a stone on the beach which when cracked open much later, in 1960, turned out to be a fossil of a creature which had lived, died and then – through Donati's action of opening the stone – been born again. "Like the alchemist was trying to create the philosophical stone, I was trying to create the egg that would give life," he explained. "So I was always involved with birth? Or is it destruction? Or is it rebirth?" A biography, Enrico Donati: Surrealism and beyond, by Theodore F. Wolff, was published in 1996.

Marcus Williamson

Enrico Donati, artist: born Milan 19 February 1909; married first Claire Javal (two daughters; marriage dissolved 1965), second Adele Schmidt (one daughter); died New York 25 April 2008.