Art on Board: Cutting Edge Light

CUTTING EDGE LIGHT

Seventy works on show at the Castello Visconteo in Novara mark the rediscovery of Divisionism, the forerunner of modern Italian painting and a movement that laid the foundations for the Futurist avant garde

by Micaela Zucconi

Opening: Emilio Longoni, Bambino con cavallino e trombetta, 1893-1896, oil on canvas fixed to card; to side, Angelo Morbelli, Meditazione, 1913, oil on canvas; below, Emilio Longoni, Ragazzina col gatto, 1893-1896, oil on board. This page: top, Gaetano Previati, La migrazione in val padana, 1916, 1917, oil on canvas, Enel Roma. Above, Angelo Morbelli, Neve, 1909, oil on canvas. Right, Giovanni Segantini, Dopo il temporale, 1883-1885

In 1891 a group of young artists, Giovanni Segantini, Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo, Angelo Morbelli, Emilio Longoni and Gaetano Previati exhibited a series of their works carried out using the new “pittura divisa” technique at the First Brera Triennale in Milan. There were only six canvases, displayed in different rooms, out of a total of 600 works by 225 artists, but this was the official introduction of Divisionism, a movement that broke with academic tradition. The exhibition entitled “Divisionismo. La rivoluzione della luce” (Divisionism. A revolution in light) highlights what curator Annie-Paule Quinsac describes as the first Italian avant garde. It is on at the Castello Visconteo in Novara until 5 April 2020, and also includes many works that are usually not available for public viewing as they belong to private collections. In 2016 Rovereto’s Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (Mart) also dedicated a show to the movement, which played an important role in Italy’s artistic renewal in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The featured artists, active above all in Lombardy and Piedmont (but also in Tuscany and Genoa), were the children of a period of artistic experimentation. In France, for example, the Pointillism – thousands of dots of pure colour placed side by side – of post-Impressionists George Seurat and Paul Signac deconstructed light by drawing inspiration

from contemporary research into optics. Italian Divisionism, however, although also influenced by this research, grew out of the environment of the Milanese Scapigliatura (The “dishevelled ones”) and the lessons of the Macchiaioli painters (“macchie” means patches or spots) Giovanni Fattori and Cesare Tallone. Unlike their French counterparts, the Italian Divisionists applied long and short strokes to the canvas, irregular filaments that lay side by side or overlapped, replacing the technique of impasto painting. “I almost immediately realised that you could not create light or air by mixing colours on the palette. I found a way to arrange them with honesty and purity, placing them side by side on the canvas”, wrote Giovanni Segantini. He used this technique to create “more light, air and truth”, interpreted through different content and meaning from those underlying French Pointillism. The Italian artists’ work displays a deep sense of nature (Segantini), suggestions of Symbolism and a spiritual touch (Previati) and the appearance of social

themes (Pellizza da Volpedo). Brothers Alberto and Vittore Grubecy De Dragon promoted the movement abroad, building a network of connections with their art gallery in Milan, even after they had split following a difference of opinion. Alberto took care of the gallery while Vittore continued his work as art critic and painter. Among these artists it was Segantini above all who found an outlet for his work outside Italy through his contacts with the artists of the Viennese Secession, a

Above, Emilio Longoni, L’oratore dello sciopero, 1890- 1891, oil on canvas. Right, from top: Giuseppe Pellizza, La processione, 1893-1895, oil on canvas, National Museum of Science and Technology, Milan. Giovanni Segantini, Savognino sotto la neve, 1890, oil on canvas. Giovanni Sottocornola, Fuori Porta, 1891, oil on canvas. Left-hand page: top, Gaetano Previati, Maternità, 1890, 1891, oil on canvas. Below, left, Vittore Grubicy, Quando gli uccelletti vanno a dormire, 1891, 1903, oil on canvas, Pinacoteca di Tortona. Below, right, Giuseppe Pellizza, Le ciliegie, c.1888-1889, Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Alessandria.

group of which he was an early member. His works had been exhibited in Vienna before, and had met with great acclaim. After a memorable posthumous exhibition, in 1901 the Austrian government dedicated a monograph to him, written by Franz Servaes and translated into Italian in 2015. The Divisionist period ended with the passing of its final representatives a century ago, in 1919 and 1920. Segantini had passed away in 1899 at the age of forty-one, and Pellizza da Volpedo committed suicide at the age of thirty-nine in 1907. The dynamic brushstrokes of Divisionism were a basis for Futurist painting. Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Gino Severini and Giacomo Balla (who had studied with Pellizza da Volpedo in Turin) formed the nucleus of Futurist painters that coalesced around Tommaso Marinetti in 1910, and they were the heirs to the techniques and ideas of Divisionism, although these were subsequently rejected, especially by Boccioni, in the search to represent the speed and movement of modern life. However, the work of the Divisionists shaped the origins of modern Italian painting.