Art

The drive from Casale Monferrato in Piedmont to Milan’s Malpensa airport passes through the area’s rice-growing region. Here, at sunrise, the glowing dawn light reflecting on the wet fields transforms them into shimmering shards of golden mirrors. It’s a fitting image to end a two-day trip on the trail of Italy’s divisionist painters.

The divisionists aren’t the best known of all the art movements, but that’s one of the reasons why, for its new show, ‘Radical Light’, the National Gallery has chosen to focus on this loose-knit bunch of 13 Milan-based painters. Between the late 1880s and 1910 they combined new optic and chromatic theories of light in their landscapes and allegorical symbolism in order to better represent man-made and natural light itself, while mixing in a few of Italy’s social and political injustices for good measure.

On the art-history timeline divisionism sits just post-the impressionism of Monet, Renoir and scenes of French bourgeois life, and just pre-futurism, which emerged in Italy in the years before World War I, with its manifesto to celebrate and capture the speed and technology of machines and the modern world. At the risk of throwing in yet another ‘ism’, the closely-related pointillists of the same period (Seurat being the most famous) explored juxtaposing dots of pure colour – so that the eye would blend them on the canvas rather than the artist blending them on the palette – in much the same way as the divsionists were experimenting with directional lines and dashes. And while their use of the technique varied (there are as many dark, atmospheric images as bright landscapes), the effects can be extraordinary, particularly in some of Giovanni Segantini’s views of the Swiss Alps, in which radiating lines of pigment are layered on the canvas like small brightly coloured threads, so that the finished painting resembles an intricate and intensely coloured embroidery.

The divisionists also stand out from their European contemporaries through their political engagement and depiction of social themes: Angelo Morbelli’s paintings of poorly paid female rice-pickers, Plinio Nomellini’s striking workers and Giuseppe Pellizza’s powerful representations of a crowd of workers advancing en masse out of the shadows of social injustice and into the light of socialism. For anyone interested in a photo-opportunity recreation of Pelizza’s iconic scene, the backdrop of the square in the Piedmont village of Volpedo (50 miles south of Milan), where Pelizza had a studio and set the images, remains largely unchanged, with flagstones marking the positions where the piece’s central characters stood.

In many ways divisionism merged into, and was subsumed by, futurism, with artists including Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni and Luigi Russolo (all showing in‘Radical Light’), much better known as futurists than divisionists. And by not having had one central theme or an easily identifiable aesthetic, divisionism has missed out on a place in the top ten of art ‘isms’. But it did have a strong central character in dealer and gallerist Vittore Grubicy. Working with brother Alberto, Grubicy established one of the first commercial galleries in Italy to actively promote its artists. He not only named divisionism but encouraged artists to paint in a divisionist style, even taking up brush and easel himself to make an eight-panel polyptych of winter landscapes on the shores of Lake Maggiorre.

It may be a slightly tenuous link, but just as brothers Charles and Maurice Saatchi parted company to focus on different business interests, so did the Grubicy brothers. Saatchi was also responsible for naming his own art ‘ism’ – new neurotic realism and while his marketing gimmick never made it into the top ten either, its not the title that’s important. On the strength of the work of its individual artists and as an experimental movement reflecting a country in transition, divisionism still deserves its place in art history.