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Friday 9 January 2009

Distinctly lacklustre

Radical light: Italy's Divisionist Painters 1891-1910
National Gallery, until 7 September, Sponsoered by Credit Suisse

This large painting can claim to be the most famous in the show (though the artist is scarcely a household name) because it is so immediately recognisable, mainly because of its cinematic nature. It depicts the peasants of Pellizza’s hometown rising against social injustice, and has the whiff of propaganda about it. It’s a less-developed version (in fact the artist abandoned it) of his more photographic masterpiece ‘The Fourth Estate’, not on show here. But before the visitor gets to examine ‘The Living Torrent’ at close quarters in room 5, there’s an awful lot of other stuff to wade through — and I’m afraid the emphasis is on awful.

In Room 2 there’s a rather Japanese-looking ‘Sea of Mist’ by Vittore Grubicy de Dragon, much better than the treacly polytych ‘Winter in the Mountains’ by the same artist. And there are a couple of very unpleasant Segantinis, ‘The Bad Mothers’ and ‘The Punishment of Lust’, which look a deal too much like Dulac on a bad night. Room 3 is too dreadful to linger in, aside from remarking that the effort to move the paint about in these ghastly symbolic scenes does occasionally prefigure the movement we will find in the Futurists’ works. Room 4 includes a tiny Giacomo Balla called ‘Study for Bankruptcy’ which has more presence than all the rest of the overblown and emotional pictures in this room. Again and again one wishes that the over-the-top brushwork was justified by the subject, but it’s simply not the case. Room 5 has the Pellizza to redeem it partially, and Carlo Fornara’s ‘Washerwomen’ has a welcome degree of lucidity. The blue-green energy of the sprouting crop (brassicas?) in Balla’s ‘Farm Worker’ has real conviction to it, much more than the figure does, and Boccioni’s ‘Story of a Seamstress’ is a masterpiece of effective subtlety in this context.

Room 6 is the one to spend time in. Here the theories of divisionism find a purpose at last as Futurism develops a matching mania. There’s a moment of wonderful spring gentleness in Boccioni’s ‘April Evening’, in which colour and light and pattern blend successfully with mood, and then the madness gets underway. Luigi Russolo’s lightning cracks down from a luridly bruised sky on to golden-haloed streetlamps, Balla’s close-up ‘Street Light’ analyses the source of electric energy in a controlled explosion, while Carra’s ghostly ‘Figures Leaving the Theatre’ look like wind-blown leaves before a storm. Vision matches method so well one can only lament that the exhibition wasn’t dominated by the Futurists with a room of Divisionists as an introduction.

More articles from: Andrew Lambirth | this section

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