January 2009

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A small press soirée at London’s National Gallery last night provided further opportunity to view its current exhibition ‘Radical Light: Italy’s Divisionist Painters 1891-1910’, which opened last month. It’s an interesting show on several counts, principally because it offers the chance to view an art movement that failed to make much international impact but did, however, pave the way for the bold brilliance of Italian Futurism.

Despite being a loose-knit group of northern Italian painters, the Divisionists were united by one big idea: the treatment of light. This was inspired by the works of French chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul and American physicist Ogden N. Rood, and achieved by using thread-like brush-strokes of ‘divided’ (unmixed) colour next to another which, at a distance, fuse to produce a startling luminosity. The then current ideas of optical science also influenced the French Pointillistes, notably Seurat and Signac. And herein lies the problem. The works on show, although conceived with different aims and motivations to their French counterparts, somehow just aren’t as compelling. Many of the landscape paintings have nice touches – light falling on the amber haunch of a cow; the pink underbelly of a cloud at sunset; or rust-coloured leaves lit by autumnal sun, but current tastes are remote from those of the 19th century. It’s rather like looking at a stack of newsagent greeting cards.

The strongest group of works here are those depicting the social unrest and widespread disillusionment in the fledgling Italian state after its largely completed unification in 1871. Angelo Morbelli’s In the Rice Fields and For Eighty Cents! both show women bent over in toil, the blazing sunlight across their backs highlighting the exploitation rather than a wholesome rustic scene. But the real showstopper is The Living Torrent by Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo, a huge canvas that reeks of confrontation as peasants march directly at the viewer (illustrated above).

The ultimate strength of the show is that it concludes with a room of Italian Futurist works so neatly demonstrates the transition of one movement to the next. Here Luigi Russolo’s lightning skyscape renders the street lights below mute and impotent, and Carlo Carrà’s The Funeral of the Anarchist Galli astonishes with its strident energy. It may be that the Divisionists represent the last gasp of the figurative tradition, but to finish with a glimpse of the Futurists proves that out of the darkness comes the light.

Radical Light: Italy’s Divisionist Painters 1891-1910 is at the National Gallery, London, until 7 September.

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