The Coal Pit (1911)

Signed and dated lower right “A. Baracchini Caputi 1911”.

Notes: Inscribed on the back “La carbonaia”.

Exhibitions: 1912, London, White City – Latin-British Exhibition (with the title Burning the Rubbish)

Bibliography: Adriano Baracchini Caputi 1883-1968. La musica del divisionismo al tempo di Vittore Grubicy, exhibition catalogue edited by F. Cagianelli (Collesalvetti, Pinacoteca comunale – 14 March – 13 June 2019), Pisa, Pacini Editore, 2019, p. 35.

One of the greatest Tuscan Divisionists, ‘a lover of twilight full of sadness, of soft dawns, of heartfelt vespers on the maremme […], of the night dense with stars and mystery’[1], Adriano Baracchini Caputi was part of that generation of post-Macchiaioli, later protagonists of the Labronico Group, promoted in their Divisionist language by Vittore Grubicy de Dragon and brought to the Salon des peintres divisionnistes italiens in Paris in 1907 by his brother, the merchant Alberto Grubicy.

If the starting point is the rustic poetics of macchia painting, the finishing point is a Divisionism with access colour enriched with Symbolist notes. The apex of Baracchini Caputi’s pointillism is to be found in his early 1910s production, when his expressive and stylistic language reached maturity, in correspondence with his close correspondence with Vittore Grubicy. La carbonaia, a painting of 1911, exhibited in the important Latin-British Exhibition of 1912 in London at the White City gallery (fig.1) with the title Burning the Rubbish, represents the acme of the painter’s chromatic evolutions, anticipating those of the paintings successfully exhibited in the four editions of the Roman Secession from 1913 to 1916.

In the Carbonaia, reality is transfigured into an almost dreamlike vision, in which the filamentous ductus of some extremely compendious portions is combined with more minute and complementary touches, especially in the definition of the sky and the trees, creating those ‘luminous symphonies of colour’[2] that were praised by Vivarelli in 1913. A Divisionism with a highly personal technique and ideist suggestions, in which colour is used to evoke crepuscular and intimate sensations, textures of thought. The fiery nature of the Maremma charcoal kiln becomes a transfiguration of a pantheistic nature, in which a phantasmal human presence blends poetically among the trees and among the chromatic and luministic play of the branches and bushes of the pine forest: Pure colours that are complementary and not amalgamated, but juxtaposed next to each other in the form of long filaments, small imperceptible touches or tesserae more or less charged with pictorial matter, which make this canvas a fundamental piece of Baracchini Caputi’s 1910s production and his subsequent evolution as expressed in the Gruppo Labronico in the 1920s.

[1] G. C. Ciappei, A. Baracchini Caputi, in ‘Bollettino di Bottega d’Arte’, II, 11, 1923.

[2] G. W. (Guido Vivarelli), Gli artisti non come artisti, in ‘Il telegrafo’, 27 July 1913.