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We have still
to consider Italy and Spain. It was only in the second half of the 19th
century that Italy became a unified state. The crucial year was 1861,
when Victor Emmanuel was crowned King of Italy. (Serfdom was abolished
in Russia in the same year.) Though the nationalists ardently desired
that Rome should be the capital of the new state, it remained merely the
capital of the Pontifical States. And so it might have remained, had not
the French defeat by the Prussian army at Sedan in 1870 and France's
subsequent capitulation led to the withdrawal from the city of French
troops.
In Italy as in Spain, innovative art forms developed mainly in the great
industrial and commercial centres of the North, particularly in Milan
and Barcelona. The style was frequently derived from the most
graceful - and insipid - forms of French Symbolist art. This description
summarizes the works of the Spanish artists Juan Brull-Vinolas (1863—
1912) and Adria Gual-Queralt (1872-1944). Brull-Vinolas attended the
Barcelona School of Fine Arts before studying in Paris, where he took up
residence. In addition to his work as a painter, Gual-Queralt was a
prominent stage director and taught acting. He played a significant role
in the theatre and was one of the major figures of the Catalan modernist
movement.
French influence also made itself felt in Italy, for example in the work
of Gaetano Previati (1852-1920) who at one stage of his career produced
"decadent" and "mystic" works. Motherhood was exhibited in Milan in 1891
and provoked a lively polemic, earning him an invitation to the Parisian Rose+Croix Salon.
Previati's Paolo and Francesca (1901) is very
much in French Symbolist style, while the execution of his 1907 Eroica in which the pigment is applied in dynamic (divisionist)
stripes, offers a foretaste of Futurism à la
Boccioni.
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Gaetano Previati
(b Ferrara, 31 Aug 1852; d Lavagna,
21 June 1920).
Italian painter and writer. He was one of the leading exponents of
Divisionism,
particularly skilled at large-scale decorative schemes, and especially
important
for his writings on technique and theory.
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Gaetano Previati
Eroica
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Gaetano Previati
The Three Marys at the Foot of the Cross
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Gaetano Previati
Dance of the
Hours
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Gaetano Previati
Maternita
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Gaetano Previati
Nel prato
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Gaetano Previati
Paolo and Francesca
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Gaetano Previati
Leda
1907
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Giovanni Segantini (1858-1899), who died at the age of thirty-nine, had
a singularly unfortunate childhood. After his mother's death, his father
abandoned him in the streets of Milan. He spent three years (from twelve
to fifteen) in a reform school, and it was thanks to the director of
this establishment that he was accepted by the Brera Academy, then
attended by many outstanding artists. He practised first a naturalist
vein, then pointillism, and turned to Symbolism when he was past thirty.
It was at this point that he was suddenly taken with a passion for
literature and philosophy. Withdrawing into the Grison mountains, he
began to read Maeterlinck, d'Annunzio, Goethe and Nietzsche, and to
study Indian philosophy. His admiration for Nietzsche is expressed in the frontispiece he drew for the Italian
translation of Thus Spake Zarathustra.
Inspired by traditional
representations of the Annunciation, it bears the title The Annunciation
of the New Word. On the wall of the garden in which the scene unfolds
can be read: "May the children of thy womb be beautiful for love, strong
for battle, and intelligent for victory"
A painting such as Love at the Springs of Life (1896) is
overwhelmingly Symbolist, in the pantheism inspired by the Alpine
landscape and in the winged figure sitting by the spring. A letter from
the artist to a friend confirms its symbolic content: The painting
"represents the joyful and carefree love of the woman and the pensive
love of the man wreathed in the natural impulses of youth and of
springtime. The path they follow is narrow and bordered with
rhododendrons in bloom, and they are dressed in white (a pictorial
representation of lilies). 'Eternal love', say the red rhododendrons,
"eternal hope," replies the evergreen privet. An angel, a mystical and
suspicious angel, spreads its great wing over the mysterious fountain of
Life. The water flows out of a bare rock, both of which are symbols of
eternity." The artist's language reflects the tenor of his philosophical
meditations in his mountain retreat.
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Giovanni Segantini
(see collection)
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Giovanni Segantini
Love at the Springs of Life
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Giovanni Segantini
The Punishment of Luxury
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Alberto Martini (1876-1954) was above all an outstanding illustrator, as
witness the splendid Indian ink drawings he executed in 1908 to
illustrate the Tales of Edgar Allan Poe. The terror of Poe's
work is evoked by the way the black ink devours the white page like a
dark cloud hiding the moon and by the energetic dramatisation of
attitudes. In his youth, Martini studied the drawings of such 16th
century German artists as Durer and Cranach.
He also illustrated the
writings of Dante,
Boccaccio, Mallarmé, Verlaine and Rimbaud. He lived in Paris from 1928
to 1931, and the Surrealists, seeing affinities between his work and
their own, made overtures to Martini but were rebuffed.
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Alberto Martini
(b Oderzo, nr Treviso, 24 Nov 1876; d Milan, 8 Nov 1954).
Italian painter and engraver. His early paintings, such as the Sacred
River Isonzo (1892), were not given serious consideration by critics
at the time. He is more highly regarded for the vast number of drawings
that he produced and that gained him his first recognition at the Venice
Biennale in 1897, where he had on display 14 drawings from the anthology
La corte dei miracoli. He concentrated mainly on illustrating
famous literary works such as Pulci’s Morgante maggiore,
Tassoni’s La secchia rapita (1895), the Divina commedia
(1901–2) and the Tales of E. A. Poe, which occupied him until
1909. His drawings for these publications show the influence of Bosch,
Pieter Bruegel I, Durer, Lucas Cranach I and Albrecht Altdorfer, whose
work he had studied in Munich. This is particularly noticeable in the
recurrent depiction of a real world controlled by spirits and monstrous
and deformed demonic beings. For these reasons critics have treated
Martini, together with de Chirico and Alberto Savinio, as one of the
precursors of Surrealism, though he never officially subscribed to it
despite his lengthy stay in Paris from 1928 onwards and his direct
acquaintance with André Breton. The series Women–Butterflies
(1915–20) bears witness to his proto-Surrealism, expressed as a
synthesis of Symbolist references combined with Liberty stylization and
elegance and dreamlike distortions, as in the black-and-white
lithograph, subsequently hand-coloured, entitled Felina (1915;
Oderzo, Pin. Com. Alberto Martini).
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Alberto Martini
Self-Portrait |
Alberto Martini
Tales
of Edgar Allan Poe
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Alberto Martini
The Struggle for Love
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The End of Venus Aphrodite
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The Virgins:
The Woman in Love |
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Human Passions: Mockery
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Human
Passions: Engulfing |
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