Giovanni Segantini Il poema universale

Exhibition project by Niccolò D’Agati

In 1885, in the rooms of the Società per le Belle Arti ed Esposizione Permanente (Society for Fine Arts and Permanent Exhibition) in Milan, in its original location in Via San Primo, Vittore Grubicy de Dragon organised a personal exhibition of Giovanni Segantini’s work entirely dedicated to his last production in Brianza. On that occasion, 14 oil paintings and 6 graphic works summed up the results of a journey that began with the painter’s move to Pusiano when, as Segantini himself reported in a letter to Tumiati in 1898, “I retired and entered the hills and lakes of beautiful Brianza, convinced that the art of painting could not be limited to colour, for colour in itself, but that it could be, skilfully used, an expressive source of sensations of love, pain or pleasure”.
The Brianza years constitute, in this respect, the main moment in Segantini’s pictorial evolution with the emergence of themes, such as the natural landscape and the view of rural life, which will form the fundamental basis of later developments. More than a glimpse of Nature, in the start of that investigation into the intimate dialogue between man, animals and the environment, the experience in Brianza represents, as emerges from the painter’s words, a phase of deepening and reflection around painting itself, the emotional value of colour and light, in a direct line of evolution with the very first experiments in Milan. Moreover, the influence exerted by his knowledge, albeit mediated by Vittore Grubicy, of Millet’s production – very evident in his iconographic choices and compositional cuts – opened up, in his personal reading of the French painter’s work to that identifiable conception of the rural world centred on what Primo Levi defined as a peculiar “natural expression, a kind of glorification, indeed, of subjects and forms whose humble inferiority he did not recognise at all, but which brought him close to that pantheistic concept” that would indelibly mark Segantini’s vision. It is in this context that the poetic, crepuscular images of Brianza are born: pastoral idylls and romances, scenes of peasant life’s work, images of a panic convergence in the communion between men, landscape and animals, individual dramas that resonate in the atmosphere of the environment, which constitute, viewed as a whole, a true poem in images in which the epic of human life and nature emerges.
It represents a very clear vision in the eyes of critics who, in 1885, emphasised precisely this aspect of the universality of Segantini’s artistic concept.
Illuminating in this sense are the words of Carlo Dossi who, in considering the works exhibited at Permanente, wrote of paintings permeated with ‘poetic qualities and philosophy. Let us even say of philosophy, because in those compositions permeates the idea of the exchange of affections between external nature and the heart’s interior, and of the commonality of sensations between man and the other living minors. In a treatise on universal love, Segantini’s sheep could find a place as our neighbour ‘.

This universal afflatus was the result of an inseparable and characteristic poetic combination of form and content in the painter’s art, which was strongly emphasised by Luigi Chirtani, according to whom Segantini’s work was unprecedented ‘for the elevation and power of expression obtained directly with means drawn exclusively from the art of painting’. His pastoral painting marked a new point of reflection: alien to the easiest and most picturesque drifts of generism, he elected rural life as the narrative fulcrum, giving it a dignity and expressive resonance, in a now reached panic interpretation of the theme, with “sober and serious intonations”, “effects full of gravity and penetrating chords, in which I could not find comparison except in the moving solemnity of the most select religious music”. For the critic, Segantini is the modern epic poet, the creator of a ‘melancholic, severe, moving poem, in which background and figures, that is, inanimate nature and the human soul interpenetrate in a resultant, in a simple, grandiose, and sad expression that borders on the sublime, and sometimes touches it’. Grubicy himself could only resort to the same image to render the sense of the ‘melodious and sad notes of this rustic and simple epic of the mountains’: for the mentor, colour and brushes expressed ‘the solemn and almost biblical song that the grandiose nature of the mountains inspired in his soul. Here painting disappears and triumphantly gives way to art’.
In continuity with the research started with past exhibitions “Verso la luce. Giovanni Segantini, dalla maniera scura alla pittura in chiaro” (12 November – 29 January 2023) and “Segantini a Milano: la serie dei Navigli” (11 November, 2023 – 12 May, 2024) – dedicated to Segantini’s formative years and to the first phases of his painting, the Galleria Civica Segantini of Arco intends focuses the new exhibition to the painter’s production in Brianza. The occasion is provided by the recent acquisition by the Municipality of Arco of an important painting, part of the Il Guado series, hitherto known to scholars only from a period photographic reproduction (for reference: A. – P. Quinsac, Segantini. Catalogo Generale, II, no. 377, Cavalli al guado).

Through a selection of works dating back to this period in Brianza, the exhibition proposes to retrace the key moments of this phase of Segantini’s production in its complexity not only in terms of themes, but also in the technical experimentalism that characterises it in the variety of mediums and pictorial solutions, as well as in the centrality that certain iconographic elaborations of these years maintain in the subsequent developments of Segantini’s art, as attested by the further re-elaborations of subjects during the 1890s.
Works such as Il bacio alla croce (St. Moritz, Segantini Museum), Pompeiana (Arco, Municipality of Arco), Pastorella alla fonte (Chur, Bundner Museum), Pastore addormentato and Il pastore innamorato (St. Moritz, Segantini Museum). and other variations on pastoral motifs from national and international public and private collections, such as the graphic variations on the theme of L’Ave Maria a Trasbordo or l’Ave Maria sui monti, will account for that particular declination of idyllic themes that Grubicy defined as ‘songs and romances’ characterised by an idealisation of the relationship between man and nature, in a panic interpretation of the landscape as a precipitate and a reflection of the emotional atmosphere of the motif.
This line is reflected, with more dramatic and individual tones, in works such as Babbo è morto (St. Mortiz, Segantini Museum) and La culla vuota! (Piacenza, Galleria d’Arte Moderna Ricci Oddi) where the use of subjects common in Italian painting of the time was freed from ‘genre’ interpretations to take on a more poetic value in relation to the emphasis on the emotional value of colour and light.
Segantini himself traced these chromatic and luministic experiments back to an attempt to ‘reproduce the feelings I felt, especially in the evening hours, after sunset, when my soul was disposed to subtle melancholies’: a tendency that is reflected and documented in the exhibition by landscape works such as Cavalli al guado and Paesaggio Brianteo (Arco, Municipality of Arco), Tramonto a Pusiano (Milan, Galleria d’Arte Moderna) and Paesaggio con donna sull’albero (Schaffhausen, Museum zu Allerheiligen) where the interpretation of the landscape goes beyond the naturalistic datum to take on a more immediately poetic value.
Alongside these subjects, the series of works dedicated to animal life and peasant work, from the variations around the animals in the stable to the images of fatigue, such as Il reddito del pastore (Tortona, “Il Divisionismo”), Il bifolco (Milan, Galleria d’Arte Moderna), La tosatura delle pecore (St. Mortiz, Segantini Museum) and the graphic declinations of the epic vision of L’ultima fatica del giorno (private collection) will restore one of the most recognisable aspects of Segantini’s epic vision of Brianza, in the inseparable relationship between man, animals and nature.

In the exhibition, alongside the works, iconographic and documentary materials from the period will be presented, useful for reconstructing some of the significant passages of Brianza’s journey and Segantini’s artistic career. Accompanying the first exhibition of Cavalli al guado (Horses at the ford), there will be didactic panels showing the results of the diagnostic investigations and scientific analyses, coordinated by Prof. Gianluca Poldi, conducted on the painting in order to present the public with useful elements for an in-depth study of Segantini’s painting technique in the Brianza years.

A catalogue of the exhibition is also planned.