Distinctly lacklustre
Andrew Lambirth
Radical Light: Italy’s Divisionist Painters 1891–1910 National Gallery, until 7 September Sponsored by Credit Suisse Divisionism is based on the scientific theory of the prismatic division of light into the colours of the spectrum. It’s more familiarly known as pointillism and its greatest exponent was Georges Seurat. Italy bred a minor outbreak of Divisionism, and it is to these artists and to a fleeting period of their work that this show is dedicated. Divisionism was one of the key staging posts on the way to Futurism, but I doubt that it deserves an exhibition all to itself.
Divisionism developed out of the Impressionists’ habit of putting unmixed colours next to each other and making the surface of the painting dance with light. The intention of the Divisionists was that the viewer’s eye would combine the unmixed dots or dashes of colour in such a way as to generate a more lively effect than mixed colours. Not everyone used dots, and touches of colour became a standard way of enlivening a painting. In the basement of the Sainbury Wing are six galleries filled with little-known Italian painters who only occasionally succeed in making a worthwhile or interesting painting. I went round the show backwards and was pleasantly surprised to see the high level it started on. Actually, this was the Futurist room it finished on, and the highest point of the exhibition. Apart from a handful of works, this is an excep tionally dull collection which does very little to warm up the NG’s dreary subterranean galleries.
The chief problem is that in so many paintings the method does not mate with the subject. Until the Futurists came along with their urge to depict frenetic movement in an urban context, the subjects of most Italian paintings (at least the ones brought together here) were landscape or figures in landscape. Although Italy was supposedly unified, it was facing political uncertainty and social unrest, but the artists kept on with the rural idyll, many of their paintings looking remarkably Pre-Raphaelite in their intensity of detail. By far the best work is by Giovanni Segantini, who is the one artist (apart from the Futurist contingent) that visitors might have heard of. The exhibition starts in the big central gallery which is dominated by a couple of powerful Segantinis. If you examine the surface of his paintings, the paint seems almost knitted together in long strokes, an appearance which closely resembles what Charles Ginner was to do in the Camden Town Group, so recently seen at the Tate. There’s an impressively minimal composition of diagonals by Angelo Morbelli called ‘The Glacier of Forni’, and a densely constructed ‘Roman Landscape’ by Umberto Boccioni (1903). Aside from these, the best feature of this first room is a big hole cut in the wall giving a vista on to a painting in another gallery — ‘The Living Torrent’ by Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo.
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 Japaneselooking ‘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.
‘It looks like your grandmother’s calendar,’ said one disaffected member of the press. The exhibition will tour to the Kunsthaus, Zurich (26 September 2008 to 11 January 2009). What a shame it’s not really radical, especially when you think of what the French were up to at the same time. It was perhaps unfortunate that I saw the Twombly exhibition just after the Divisionist one. Twombly is so uplifting and life-affirming that almost anything would suffer in comparison.
In my review of the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition (Arts, 14 June), I completely missed out the sculpture in the courtyard. The Academy’s forecourt is a very fine outdoor venue for sculpture in the heart of London, which makes it slightly sad that Anthony Caro — who really doesn’t need the exposure — should be asked to fill it this year. Fine sculptor though he is, bigger is not necessarily better in his case, though I suppose this particular promenade of dark-grey and oddly shaped steel sentry boxes does provide a useful variety of seats for the fatigued public. However, it also distracts attention unfairly from another sculpture, sited to the right of the entrance to the Academy, an equestrian piece by Michael Sandle. Sandle is one of our most distinguished public sculptors, a great protestor and polemicist, who here shows ‘St George’s Horse’, a polished cross riding side-saddle on a chunky charger with a tail like a drillbit. Sandle’s horse is part machine, part flayed or armoured animal, recalling both the wildly romantic horses in late de Chirico paintings and the Futurists’ dynamic sculptures. He should have had the whole courtyard.
Last chance to see a group of Helen Frankenthaler’s paintings, infrequently shown in England. At Bernard Jacobson, 6 Cork Street, W1 (until 5 July) are just 11 pictures from the 1950s to 2002. For ‘Vessel’ (1961) alone, this exhibition is worth a visit: a remarkable coming-together of colour and form, both expressive and inventive. Beautiful.
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