Giovanni Segantini: A passion for nature

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Segantini

Edited by Beyeler Museum Ag, Diana Segantini, Guio Magnaguagno, Ulf Küster

Landscape painter Giovanni Segantini (1858–99) was one of late-19th-century Italian art’s leading lights. In the 1880s, at the peak of his career, he was an artist of international renown, but until the last few decades he has been given little attention by art historians.  As researchers have returned to study this period with closer attention, Segantini’s reputation for capturing the Alpine light of mountain scenes has been restored to prominence. Focusing on Segantini as a painter of light, the book looks at his role in reviving landscape painting and paving the way for modernism.

Trained at the Brera Academy in Milan, Segantini was part of the city’s Divisionist movement. He and his fellows Divisionists, Gaetano Previati, Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo, Emilio Longoni, Angelo Morbelli, and Vittore Grubicy de Dragon, who owned a gallery which promoted Divisionist work, developed a technique of applying strokes of pure colour in order to produce shimmering light effects.

This technique was similar to Pointillism, made famous by Georges Seurat and Paul Signac in Paris, but was developed independently from the same source books on optical science.  It differed in that the Divisionists used longer thinner strokes, like embroidery threads, and applied the scientific rules less vigorously, using their instinct to choose colours and their juxtapositions.  

While in Paris and Milan these techniques were applied to images of modern life, Segantini shunned the urban artistic centres, choosing to live an isolated life with his family in the Swiss Alps, and painted the Alpine landscape, its people and above all, its light. He moved to higher and higher altitudes, always closely examining the effect of light on the nature he so adored. As well as depicting landscapes and rural daily life, Segantini also created religious and Symbolist images, such as his Ave Maria on the Lake and The Wicked Mothers, respectively, but even in these scenes, nature, and the play of light upon it, are the real subjects. It is only in his self-portraits that the nature with which he surrounded himself is excluded.

This book is lavishly illustrated with large full-colour reproductions of Segantini’s paintings, which are themselves often very large and rarely leant to other museums on account of their fragility; his Triptych of Life is a prime example, and is reproduced here over six pages.  The book includes a number of photos of Segantini working on his canvases in the open air, and these convey more about the artist than his self-portraits.  The mountains were his studio as well as his subject, and his last words were ‘I want to see my mountains’.

This passion is evident not only in his works but also in the essays in this volume.  Leading experts on Segantini have contributed short essays which enrich the catalogue with detail about the artist, his relation to his contemporaries elsewhere in Europe, the mountain environments he chose to dwell in, and his relationships with the mountains, as evident in his diaries and letters. Their focus is academic, but the language is clear, and the text is useful to any student interested in the artist’s relationship with the mountains.  The quality of the images in this book, however, renders it of interest to anyone with a passion for shimmering paintings of the Alps and the light that illuminates these scenes.

Segantini, edited by Beyeler Museum Ag, Diana Segantini, Guio Magnaguagno, Ulf Küster is published by Hatje Cantz 2011. 172 pp. 113 colour /24 mono illus. ISBN 978-3-7757-2765-5