Tim Parks on divisionist movement of painters in Italy (original) (raw)

While the French were painting pretty landscapes, says the teacher, "our Italian artists were documenting the plight of the poor".

The canvas she's pointing to shows a drab interior where line upon line of unkempt elderly men, all dressed in black, sit despondent on wooden benches. A class of sniggering adolescents is crowding round. "Who painted it, maestra? When exactly?" She's not sure. (It's by Angelo Morbelli.)

"And what's this? What's this?"

Along the wall to the left is a large dark canvas, two metres by three, whose varnished surface reflecting daylight from the window opposite makes it impossible to see anything but glossy darkness. The teacher goes to the room's list of works by the door. "Of course," she announces: "Giovanni Sottocornola. The Worker's Dawn. 1897." And she adds vaguely, "Divisionismo."

When they've gone, I find that this sombre panorama, soon to be removed to the National Gallery in London for the exhibition Radical Light: Italy's Divisionist Painters 1891-1910, will disclose its content if you stand to the side and look from an acute angle: under brightly blurred street lamps a gloomy crowd, heads bowed against the rain, hurries over wet asphalt and gleaming tramlines. Close up, you can see that the diffuse tension between light and dark is achieved by laying threads of pure colour side by side, rather as if Seurat had preferred dashes to dots.

Further to the left is another Morbelli painting made in the Milan old people's home known as Pio Albergo Trivulzio. The year was 1903. Here the darkness is even more impenetrable, the bowed heads of two women in black headscarves distinguished from the shadow behind only by the modelling of the brushstrokes. Again you have to move around for an angle that will release the image from the window's reflection. The reference to religious iconography, as if these decrepit women were the ghosts of antique saints, is clear enough.

The first rooms of Milan's Galleria d'Arte Moderna exhibit the kind of sculptures and paintings in vogue when the place was built in the 1790s, soapy statues of nymphs and goddesses, canvases of such dull erudition - mythical scenes, meetings of learned societies - so flat and unremarkable in their handling of light and colour, that you can appreciate how, by the mid-1800s, any self-respecting young artist would have been desperate to sweep the whole worn-out tradition aside.

A corridor on the first floor displays the response of the so-called scapigliati, or "dishevelled ones", the first wave of innovators. From the 1850s on, the scapigliati tried to inject new feeling into their work by breaking up outline and contour in a swirl of soft-focus sentiment. Their sculptures, often with a wax surface to facilitate a melting effect, are impressive but grotesque; the heads of old men appear to disintegrate in decay; children's faces push out from the material as if not quite free from the womb.

The movement's painters tried harder to please with pretty women dissolving in pastel colours and a general emotional blur between subject and background. Though the content of their work hardly suggests it, the scapigliati also established the precedent that opposition to the art world's academic status quo would go hand in hand with political radicalism: various members of the group were among Garibaldi's 1860 expedition to Sicily that eventually led to the unification of Italy under the Piedmontese crown. Hopes that the country's cultural life would be reinvigorated were high.

"And this is the Segantini room," announces a more sprightly and better-informed teacher, taking a door off the corridor. She gathers her pupils under The Angel of Life, another large, London-bound canvas, and explains that Giovanni Segantini was one of half a dozen serious exponents of divisionismo, a movement that came on to the scene in the late 1880s, influenced by both the scapigliati and the French pointillists.

At first glance, Segantini's painting has nothing in common with the works of Morbelli and Sottocornola. In a soft glow of pale blue, a highly idealised mother and child sit airily robed in the crook of a gnarled tree whose gothic branches blacken as they reach into the sky above an alpine backdrop complete with silvery lake.

"This is simbolista," the teacher declares, "a religious image secularised for a modern context" - the date is 1894 - and she explains how, following the publication of new theories about light and colour, rather than mixing their paints, the divisionists divided them up, juxtaposing fine lines of pure pigment to increase the luminosity of their work.

The painting has a sickly, pre-Raphaelite quality. And looking at Segantini's other works on display here - another life-size study of mother and baby (this time realistically seated, in peasant dress on a milking stool in a lantern-lit barn beside a cow and its newborn calf), a plunging horse, a mountain plateau, a cow at a drinking trough - you immediately run up against the conundrum that divisionism poses for every viewer: what is the relationship between this peculiar technique and its subject matter? The logic of impressionism's move into the open air for the wind in the trees and the bustle of the Parisian crowd is immediately evident: method and material call to each other, asserting the fleeting subjectivity of moment-by-moment experience. But what makes divisionism, with its claims to greater scientific know-how, simultaneously suitable for images of social protest, meditative landscapes and this rather embarrassing recycling of Christian icons?

The man who did most to put Italian divisionism on the map and give it an international profile was Vittore Grubicy. Born in 1851, he visited London in his early 20s to scout on behalf of an art collector, set up a gallery with his brother in Milan in 1876, and spent long periods in France and Belgium in the 1880s. It was here that he saw the first works of pointillism and post-impressionism, and on his return to Italy he transmitted his excitement to Segantini and, later, Morbelli and Gaetano Previati, all of whom eventually produced divisionist works for his gallery.

To the amusement of his friends, Grubicy also decided to start painting himself, and 12 of the 54 paintings the National Gallery is bringing to London are in his name. It is a strange choice. The least accomplished of the group, Grubicy painted small landscapes mainly concerned with moody lighting effects, charming and unremarkable. Light, Grubicy claimed, was one with life, and painting it more truthfully and intensely following modern scientific principles could act positively on the moral character of the nation. But in the room where his paintings hang, it is two landscapes by Emilio Longoni that catch the eye: here the divisionist technique is more daringly applied, as wavy parallel lines of red, green and blue merge into intensely meditative visions of an alpine pool, a glacial expanse.

Having signed up to Grubicy's gallery in 1880, the talented young Longoni left in disgust when Grubicy, in an attempt to get better value for his paintings, signed one of them in Segantini's name. Later, an interest in Marxism and radical politics led Longoni to take up social issues, and his Orator of the Strike is one of the main features of the London show. Almost life-size, a worker perched on a wall clutches a post to lean out over the crowd he is addressing. It's a strong dramatic image, but again hard to see why the divisionist technique, which tends to impose precisely the mood of stillness so effective in the alpine landscapes, is appropriate.

This tension between method and intent is even clearer in Morbelli's For Eighty Cents, which purports to protest at the poor wages paid to workers in northern Italy's rice paddies. However, the image of a dozen women seen from behind as they stoop in pink, yellow and blue dresses, all luminously reflected in the water they stand in, has an intense beauty that stirs no desire at all for change. Either these artists blindly assumed that a method that was "scientific" must be allied to social progress, or the political posturing was actually an alibi for aestheticising the predicament of the working class.

"We have made Italy, now we must make Italians," the statesman Massimo d'Azeglio announced after Rome was taken from the Pope in 1870. A decade on, it was clear that this task would not be easy. Paradoxically, the Italian government's tendency to put national pride before economic common sense slowed rather than accelerated the process of nation building. A tariff war with France in the late 1880s pushed grain prices prohibitively high and caused banks to collapse. Attempts to establish colonies in Ethiopia in the 90s led to humiliating defeat. Rapid industrialisation brought large-scale social unrest and emphasised the split between industrial north and agrarian south. The lack of cohesion was not helped by the Pope's continued refusal to recognise Italy's possession of Rome and his instruction to Catholics not to take part in Italian elections. In this scenario, Grubicy's attempt to make divisionism a specifically Italian movement, his bizarre later denials that it had owed anything at all to French post-impressionism, can be seen as part of a general attempt to build a national culture.

The problem went deep. As early as 1826, Giacomo Leopardi had claimed that Italians found it more difficult than their northern neighbours to sustain a positive sense of collective identity. With the collapse of traditional communities and belief systems, England and France, Leopardi believed, had been able to fall back on well-developed, moneyed societies that had gradually substituted a morality based on religion with one that rested on custom and aesthetics, so that a man was "ashamed to do wrong in the same way that he would be ashamed to appear in a conversation with a stain on his clothes".

Italy, on the other hand, divided as it then was, despotically governed and dominated by a religion that people observed - as Leopardi saw it - mostly out of superstition and subservience, had no such resources. People were more cynical, looking only to their own interests. Public debate was no more than "a school for insults". What was required in these circumstances, Leopardi felt, was some collective "illusion" that would encourage people to respect themselves and each other. Revolutionary leader Giuseppe Mazzini picked up this idea: Italians must develop a "religious concept of their nation", he claimed.

This need to find, or invent, some shared idea of who the Italians were prompted artists and writers to focus on the question of community, or rather the transformation of traditional community into modern society. Giovanni Verga's marvellous novellas evoke the peasant world of Sicily with a mixture of nostalgia for a rapidly disappearing rural life and horror at the empty hypocrisy of all moral discourse. In so many of these stories, most intensely in Rosso Malpelo, which tells of a brutalised young worker in a Sicilian sulphur mine, it seems that the only way forward will be through an act of violence.

Seen in the light of this yearning for national identity, the heterogeneous works of the divisionists begin to call to each other and make sense. The recovery of Christian symbols in secular settings betrays a desire to connect back to Italy's devotional tradition, even in the absence of an underpinning theology. The effect is often crudely emphasised by arching the top of the paintings, something typical of votive works. Likewise the images of peasants and workers, always represented as in harmony with the landscape or themselves a force of nature, stress their solidarity and the painter's desire for solidarity with them. The largest painting at the National's show, Giuseppe Pellizza's The Living Torrent, has a huge crowd of farm workers marching down a valley directly towards the viewer. At the head of the group, beside two biblically bearded leaders, a woman holds a baby, reminding us that the mother-child relationship is the basis of all community, or at least all Italian community.

One of the most accomplished divisionists, Pellizza didn't paint only workers. The Procession, finished just before The Living Torrent, shows a church congregation walking towards us, led by three nuns in white holding a crucifix. The sense of a community moving forward together and the intimate connection of figures and landscape would appear to be more important than the purpose of the march. To add to the ambiguity behind these artists' work, while the socialism they subscribed to looked to the future, their paintings and the Catholic symbols they drew on suggest a powerful nostalgia. The sentiment is strongest in Morbelli's poignant depictions of the elderly poor: community is most intensely felt, it seems, where it is almost dead.

As Italy's economic situation worsened, social unrest intensified to reach a climax in 1898, when the army fired on a crowd in Milan, killing 80. Whether because of police repression or, more probably, because their whole approach was unsuited to the portrayal of conflict, this massacre marked the end of the divisionists' focus on social protest. Segantini had long withdrawn to his beloved Alps. Morbelli set up his studio in the old people's home. Pellizza shifted towards symbolism and rural settings. So it was left to a second generation of divisionists, most notably Umberto Boccioni, to transform the movement into something more convincingly engaged with modern life.

Surprisingly, Boccioni's mentor among the divisionists is the one whose work is hardest to take for the modern viewer. Gaetano Previati was above all a symbolist, creating images that fuse Christian and classical iconography in landscape settings. Luminous Madonnas sit in fields of lilies or chrysanthemums; his Chariot of the Sun turns the myth of Phaeton into an impressive if pompous divisionist study of light. But this rejection of realism allowed Previati to break up perspectives and let some dynamism into his painting; in the very bizarre Maternità, for example, a mother and child, sit in a whirl of angels' wings and mountaintops. Similarly sized and equally snowy, folding wings and peaks seem interchangeable.

To move from this canvas to Boccioni's The City Rises is to see the much younger artist applying the same dynamism to the subject of urban development. The scene is a big construction site; in a vortex of activity a red horse, yoked in blue, heaves building materials among frantic workers tugging on ropes. But the viewer no longer watches from a distance. Rather, he is plunged into the action, so that it's hard at first to make out what is going on, only that it is exciting and important. All the Catholic pathos and picturesque nostalgia of the earlier divisionists is gone. Solidarity with the worker's plight has been replaced by enthusiasm for the future he is building. And in fact the painting is dated 1910, one year after Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto had declared: "We shall sing the great crowds agitated by labour, pleasure and sedition. We shall sing the multicoloured and polyphonic ebb and flow of the revolutions in modern capitals . . ."

With the arrival of this convincing fusion of technique and subject matter, this emphatically positive vision, or "illusion", of an Italy in the making, divisionism was all at once a thing of the past. It was in this new, euphoric spirit that Boccioni along with other futurists would volunteer for the first world war. And it would be precisely this idea of a national unity forged through heroic collective effort that Mussolini would exploit in his creation of fascism.

· Radical Light: Italy's Divisionist Painters 1891-1910 is at the National Gallery, London WC2, from June 18 to September 7. For details, call 020 7747 2885 or go to nationalgallery.org.uk