“Questo mio sogno ideale”.
(This ideal dream of mine)

In the wake of Segantini.

On 29 January 1899, Segantini published his Lettera ai giovani (Letter to the young) in the pages of ‘Il Marzocco’ in which he spurred them on: “Study the language of nature if you want to reproduce its eternal thought in your canvases. Young colleagues, my friends, I would like these words of mine to be heard by all of you. If this ideal dream of mine comes to life in Italy, I with my spirit, now and always, will be with you’.

The extent to which Segantini’s words served as both a warning and a programmatic statement for later generations is clearly documented in a note by Umberto Boccioni – whose small early work on display here bears witness to his study of the Arcense master’s work – in his Diari. (Diaries) On 30 March 1907, reflecting on the theme of Nature, on that need to express in painting that eternal thought that Segantini indicated as the ultimate aim of the study of nature itself, Boccioni noted: “Segantini was right to urge a return to the humble dais of the meadow, leaving behind the pretensions of accomplished artists”. Segantini’s quotation was palpably derived from the aforementioned letter in which the Arcense painter wished for the advent of new “primitive spirits of the new art” in a vision that sought “nature that speaks to the spirit, a drawing that expresses an idea, a line that expresses a thought, a colour that gives life and light to colour, that makes one listen to the harmonious pleasure of the flower, that raises the most seemingly natural fact to the form of an eternal symbol”. “Strip yourselves,” Segantini said, “I beg you, of the ridiculous garb of clever little artists, and set yourselves to study with feeling the humble daisy and the blades of grass that surround it”.

Rather than the phenomenon of so-called Segantinism – of those artists, that is, who only superficially imitated the modes and themes of Segantini’s painting – this room presents the works of artists, the only true direct pupils of the painter, such as Carlo Fornara and Giovanni Giacometti, who were able to make his teaching their own more than anyone else. Working in close contact with him, Fornara and Giacometti were able to understand the intimate nature of his painting based not on the imitation of reality, but on its recreation by means of a highly refined language based on the centrality of the pictorial sign and on the search for the intensity of light and colour as the main means of expression of the Idea. It is no coincidence that, even in the two self-portraits exhibited here, the two painters recover Segantini models, almost as a tribute to the central role the painter had in their training. In 1894 Giacometti had, for the first time, the opportunity to admire Segantini’s work in person and was thunderstruck by it: from then on, a continuous and constant familiarity developed until his death centred on the teaching that, as the painter recalls, Segantini imparted to him:  “to study nature and render it as he feels it, there lies the essence”. Segantini’s meeting with Fornara was no less fundamental. Fornara had been invited by him to spend August 1898 in Maloja to help him with the Panoramaundertaking. In an interview in 1928, Fornara recalled that meeting as follows: “He seemed to live and work under the foreboding of death. […] I remember that when, on Segantini’s behalf, Grubicy informed me of this offer, I almost wept with joy and emotion. […] I can still see him smiling affectionately at me; I can hear his fatherly admonition ‘Make judgement; art is beautiful, but terrible…'”.

Alongside the pupils, a selection of paintings and graphic works by Segantini’s sons, Mario and Gottardo, illustrates the different ways in which their father’s teaching shaped their aesthetic approaches. Mario, more inclined toward symbolic abstraction, developed a style that was at times naive and synthetic, while Gottardo pursued a more traditional vision, following the path of his father’s naturalism.