Despite the absence of his capital canvas, the Bassano exhibition restores the artist’s particularity. Singer of mountain life, his asceticism mixed with a pre-ecologicalism make him unique
Can we have an ambitious exhibition on Giovanni Segantini, such as the one currently visible at the Civic Museum of Bassano del Grappa (curated by Niccolò d’Agati, until next February 22nd), without a capital masterpiece such as the Two Mothers of the Gallery of Modern Art in Milan? Yes, but it’s not the same thing. This is what I wrote about the Two Mothers a few years ago: «Milan, 1891: the first Brera Triennale, the collective exhibition that aims to measure the level of modernity of Italian art, proposes, in the two works destined to leave the greatest mark, the treatment of a very traditional subject, rather indifferent to the desire for current events, for an anecdote of life and for social commitment felt by the majority of participants: motherhood. One, from 1890, is due to the emerging Gaetano Previati (1852-1920), from Ferrara by origin, close to the scapigliatura in its beginnings, the other, from 1889, is instead by Giovanni Segantini (1855-1899), a native of Arco di Trento, also better known abroad.
Both artists are part of the “stable” of Vittore Grubicy de Dragon, with his brother Alberto commercial agent of the young Lombard talents on the international market, who is promoting, also as a painter, Divisionism, the Italian version of Pointillisme by Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, from whose excess of scientific methodicality he also distances himself.
The reception that critics and the public reserve for the two artists is different: merciless with the “ideism”, as the most conceptual symbolism was then called, of Previati’s Maternità, of which the unrealism is contested not only of the composition – a mother breastfeeding under an apple tree, surrounded by angels involved in similar mystical transport – but also of the technique, made of luminous filaments that differentiate the color into its components and cancel the drawing in a continuum in which the vibration of the dominant tone tries to visually identify with the momentum of the spirit; generous with Segantini’s Two Mothers, which is perceived as a work not of rupture, but of prevalent continuity with the most popularizing Lombard naturalism, set in a stable by lantern light in which, moreover, the human and bestial conditions undergo an equalization bordering on sacrilege (…). The choice to present in Brera a painting apparently concentrated on expressive issues had paid off, the colouristic rendering, à la Rembrandt, of an interior darkness that artificial light breaks, evidently not without at least an accessory symbolic value (rectitude), resolved by Segantini through the crumbling of the touches, more contracted and thickened compared to Previati’s trails, spread out frontally like shavings of straw, between the real ones and the surrounding air to which they are assimilated, which vary the different levels of exposure to the light, managing, however, to give the scene an extraordinary, touching unity of feeling, even in its more rustically olfactory aspects, which absolutely divinises – here it is, another occult ideism – motherhood according to nature, whatever the animal species in which it manifests itself.
Deprived of maternal affection as a child, Segantini searches for its original root in a humble and still archaic world, immune from the delirium of modern technology and the mercantile vulgarity of the bourgeois class, in the old romantic belief that the good can only exist in the non-civilised, moving according to the same poetic binomial (the progressivism of the form which expresses the substantial conservatism of the moral and social content) which is pursued, although certainly not in artistically coincident terms, by Gauguin voluntary exile in Brittany and Tahiti.”
In short, in the Two Mothers, there is everything that Segantini had become at that time, corresponding to the “Savognin period” in which the artist had decided to abandon Milan and its surroundings for the more solitary Swiss Grisons where he was rediscovering the meaning of life in direct contact with nature.
The initial experiences in the wake of the scapigliatura were definitely behind us, with Segantini the mountaineer who grasped the urge towards a new sentimental sensitivity expressively translated into chromatic vaporousness, but who shared little in the fact of recognizing in this taste the chrism of a culturally privileged bourgeois society.
The dead hero of the Kunstmuseum of San Gallo (1880), whose exceptional nature is rediscovered in the circumstance, is a black work that goes against the trend of disheveled mawkishness, finding space in the history of the slanted male nude defined by Mantegna and Annibale Carracci at least. Elements of originality with a certain disengaged line can also be felt in the Hanging Goose (1881), with a Dutch character before the Hague School, and in the portraiture of the moment in which a Luisa Violini Tacchi (1880) stands out who seems to come from the Vienna of twenty years later. Informed by Vittore Grubicy, Segantini discovered the social dimension of Millet and Van Gogh, but interpreting peasant life in a depoliticized key in which the lyricism of spiritual yearning makes one forget material poverty. Return from the Woods (1890), with the woman pulling the sleigh on the snow towards the town, is the epiphanic indication of the right path, unknown to modern citizens who are also taking steps to support Segantini’s panic philosophies by purchasing his works. The more he distances himself from the dominant trend of his time, the more the artist acquires an international scope which is still particularly felt today along the entire Alpine continent, in the sign of a pioneering ecologism which yesterday as today reconciles civil evolution and continuity with certain backwardnesses of the past with no little contradiction.
I have also written about Segantini’s latest production, heralded by works with a now mysterious charm such as La vanità (1892): «With the move to Maloja (1894), in the Swiss mountains of the Engadine, Segantini’s works become obsessive contemplations from high altitudes, increasingly symbolist and daring in their workmanship, chasing the mirages, sometimes with an almost Pre-Raphaelite flavour, of holy mothers, protecting angels, girls in love at the source of life, purities of soul and landscape unknown to others. So unknown that when he wanted to dedicate a gigantic polyptych to the Engadine for the Universal Exhibition in Paris, the Engadine people did not recognize themselves in the representation. He died during its construction, in 1899, his wife Bice Bugatti at his side, from peritonitis that a city hospital could perhaps have treated.”
