Giovanni Segantini is a painter known above all for two aspects. The first is the use of the pointillist technique of which he was a great master. The second are the purely symbolist themes that characterize above all the second phase of his activity.
In this video I will mainly focus on a painting kept in Vienna entitled “the bad mothers”, considered the painter's masterpiece; to follow I will also present a similarly inspired painting, "the punishment of the lustful" which is a few years earlier. Of both works that we can consider a kind of diptych, there is also a monochrome version.
To frame the figure of Segantini and fully understand the works that I will present in this video, it is important to give some biographical notes.
The painter had a very difficult childhood. Born in Arco in Trentino in 1858, he lost his mother and seven years and his father entrusted him to the care of his half-sister who lived in Milan. In fact, however, little Segantini was left to himself to the point of being arrested for wandering and locked up in a reformatory where he remained for some years.
The passion for art soon found its way into the boy who enrolled in evening courses at the Brera Academy which he attended for three years
An important turning point for Segantini was the contact with an important gallery owner, Vittore Grubicy de Dragon thanks to which he obtained visibility and the first successes. In this first phase of his activity, the painter devoted himself above all to rural landscapes with an inspiration that brings him closer to Millet and the Barbizon school.
In 1886, at the age of 28, the painter left Milan and the plain and retired to the mountains in the Grisons in Switzerland. Here his works began to be imbued with an almost mystical symbolism.
Segantini despite having profound cultural gaps, had a curious personality and was a voracious reader. He became passionate about Schopenhauer and Nieztsche who influenced his vision of his art.
The technique that the painter began to adopt was instead the pointillist one which involves the use of pure colors, not mixed but spread in thin juxtaposed filaments. This filamentous texture, seen from a suitable distance, makes the color uniform and vibrant.
The promotion work of Vittore Grubicy continued over the years and contributed to affirm the figure of Segantini also abroad, who also began to collaborate with some art magazines.
“The bad mothers” was not successful, on the contrary it was crushed as “symbolic abstraction”. But the painting found no less than in the Emperor Franz Joseph, a great admirer so much so that the painting was purchased and merged into the Viennese collections. The same artists of the Secession exalted the work which became one of the most important paintings of the entire European symbolism.
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17 янв 2021
