Flakes of light
John Russell Taylor welcomes an exhibition in London that proves the Italian Divisionists were more than a dead end.
John Russell Taylor, Monday, 25th August 2008
The trouble with Italy between, say, 1850 and 1914 for British students of art history, schooled as they inevitably will be, know it or not, by Roger Fry, is that most of the right things happen, but by French standards they happen in the wrong order or the wrong combinations. Imagine, no real Impressionists, except De Nittis, and he spent most of his career working in the more sympathetic purlieus of Paris. And no, whatever British curators have tried to convince us, the Macchiaioli are more Barbizon than Giverny. Then, what are we to make of an art that passes straight from Pre-Impressionism to Pointillism and Symbolism – frequently combined in the cause of a Hard Times sort of Social Realism? After all, according to the categorical French, the three things should be, in artistic circles at least, daggers drawn.
In the context of such ideas, the Divisionisti are, to put it mildly, a challenge. Hence, it is admirable indeed that the National Gallery, avowedly determined these days not only to tell us more about stuff that we know in outline already, but to bring us totally new experiences, should have taken on the task of effecting the introduction.
How new the Divisionisti are for Britain is hardly in doubt. In 1990 I was dragooned into being the British end of the epoch-making Trento exhibition ‘Divisionismo Italiano’ and writing the section of the festschrift devoted to the Divisionists’ reputation outside Italy. In the event I could find only one Divisionist painting in a British public collection, Liverpool’s version of Segantini’s The Punishment of Lust, and virtually no contemporary notice of their existence anywhere. A few years later I discovered how neglected they still were, even in Italy. I was on a press trip devoted to the cultural charms of Genoa. One day, in the cathedral, we came round a corner to cries of horror. ‘What’s that?’, several asked with varying degrees of disgust. ‘That’s a Previati’, I said innocently. There was a stunned silence, then our guide, a pre-eminent expert in Genoese baroque, flicked through his book and admitted, ‘Yes, you’re right. But I hardly think we need bother with that!’
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