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By the end of the 19th century, the fledgling Italian
state faced economic crisis, political uncertainty and widespread social
unrest. The unification of Italy, largely accomplished by 1871, had
promised the Italian people an idealised vision of democracy and
national progress. The reality left many feeling alienated and
disillusioned. Artists, moreover, feared that contemporary Italian
painting was lagging far behind that of other European nations. History
and art had come to a crucial turning point.
In northern Italy, a loosely knit group of avant-garde
artists, who would come to be known as Divisionists, began in the final
decades of the century to mount a radical artistic response to
contemporary conditions. What they achieved came to define their age.
Through ‘the investigation of colour in light’
(Giovanni Segantini), the Divisionists sought to challenge the paradoxes
of the modern world. Influenced by the study of optical science, they
believed unmixed threads of ‘divided’ colour would fuse for the viewer
at a distance and bring maximum luminosity to their paintings. This
technical innovation accounts for the singular intensity of their
paintings.
Many of the key Divisionists were also politically
motivated. From the early 1890s, Giovanni Segantini, Angelo Morbelli and
Emilio Longoni, among others, adopted Socialist ideas and strove for ’an
art not for art’s sake but for humanity’s sake’.
As thousands of workers migrated from the fields to
the cities, many Divisionists abandoned the bleak modernity of Milan and
Turin for the countryside. Segantini escaped to the Swiss Alps where the
solitude of the mountains inspired some of his greatest works, including
the exultant 'Spring in the Alps', 1897 (Private collection) and 'The
Punishment of Lust', 1896/7 (Kunsthaus, Zurich).
Giuseppe Pellizza returned to his rural birthplace,
Volpedo, where he became an agent for social change, championing the
cause of the workers on his estate. In 'The Living Torrent', 1895–6 (Pinacoteca
di Brera, Milan), Pellizza depicts the unstoppable progress of the
proletariat – employing his own workers as models for the crowd –
advancing towards the light of social justice. Nearby, Angelo Morbelli
returned to the rice fields of Piedmont, where he took up the cause of
the oppressed women rice workers in 'For Eighty Cents!', 1893–5 (Museo
Borgogna). In Milan, he also chronicled the lives of the urban poor and
elderly.
Working high above Lake Maggiore, the art dealer,
painter and critic, Vittore Grubicy, achieved a series of masterful
bucolic landscapes, including his eight-canvas polyptych 'Winter in the
Mountains', 1894–1911, (Milan, Civiche Raccolte d’Arte), seen by many as
the manifesto of Divisionism. Grubicy is credited as being the first
apostle and most influential propagandist of the movement. After
discovering Giovanni Segantini in the early 1880s, he acted as mentor
and patron to several key Divisionists, including Longoni, Morbelli and
Previati.
Despite this considerable artistic exchange, the
Divisionists failed to achieve the cohesion necessary to enter the broad
international consciousness. Yet the plurality of their vision is
equally what makes the movement so distinctive and dynamic. |
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