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Monday 1 December 2008

Defying definition

Laura Gascoigne on Divisionism

How to define Divisionism? To put it in focus, a party of us travelled to Milan. We looked in on the artists’ alma mater, the Brera, where we saw Boccioni’s sketch for ‘The City Rises’ (1910), celebrating the construction of cooling reservoirs for a new electricity-generating plant in Piazza Trento. We visited Milan’s Galleria d’Arte Moderna in the gaudily restored Villa Belgiojoso Bonaparte, where we saw (with difficulty in abominable lighting) the pantheistic polyptych ‘Winter in the Mountains’ produced by Grubicy in the Lakes in the 1890s after he jacked in picture-dealing for painting. We walked around the Cimitero Monumentale (where the Grubicy brothers’ ashes are interred together) to take the pulse of the city’s secular culture among some astonishingly erotic funerary monuments by Symbolist sculptors such as Enrico Butto and Leonardo Bistolfi. We strolled down the Galleria Vittorio Emmanuele, where Boccioni used to visit Previati in his studio and where he set his hilarious ‘Riot in the Galleria’ (1910), showing ladies in ridiculous floral hats fleeing an anarchist explosion in a café. And for a more authentic flavour of political activism we dined in the Osteria del Treno in the old Railway Mutual building in Via San Gregorio — recently reclaimed from a porn cinema — where three young art students at the Brera painted a mural of marching workers on the ceiling in 1898.

The mural’s official unveiling had been scheduled for 1 May, but political events overtook it. On 6 May 1898 civil unrest over a new flour tax erupted into direct action when crowds of protestors marched on the Palazzo Reale, raiding bakeries en route. General Bava-Beccaris’s troops opened fire on the crowd in the Piazza del Duomo, killing 80 protestors and wounding several hundred; King Umberto decorated the general and was himself rewarded with assassination two years later.

The Bava-Beccaris massacre and the savage clampdown that followed dampened the political powder of the Divisionists, who retreated to the relative safety of rural subjects. Pellizza retired to his home village of Volpedo outside Tortona, where he devoted three years to painting ‘The Fourth Estate’, paying (and clothing) the local peasantry to pose as workers marching on the village square. By the time he showed the work in 1901 its moment had passed, and its disappointing reception contributed to the depression that culminated in his suicide six years later, after the death of his wife. Pellizza’s friend Morbelli, who came from Colma near Casale Monferrato, had more luck with his muted protest paintings of women rice-pickers in the Po Valley, winning praise at the first Venice Biennale in 1895 for a picture poignantly titled ‘For Eighty Cents!’. Even Longoni made a successful transition to landscape, taking to the mountains in the steps of Segantini — though when his painting ‘The Glacier’ won the Prince Umberto prize of L6,000 at the exhibition celebrating the opening of the Semplon Pass in 1906, the boracic old anarchist refused to accept it.

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