Pumpkin seller (1920)

Signed lower left: ‘Arturo Noci / Pellestrina 1920’.

Exhibitions: I Biennale Romana. Esposizione Nazionale di Belle Arti nel cinquantenario della Capitale, Rome 1921.

Essential bibliography: I Biennale Romana. Esposizione Nazionale di Belle Arti nel cinquantenario della Capitale, Rome 1921, p. 170, n. 12; M. Fagiolo dell’Arco, P. Spadini, L. Djokic (eds.), Arturo Noci: un pittore tra Roma e New York 1874-1953, Rome 1996, p. 112, no. 214, repro p. 114; M. Carrera, Arturo Noci (1874-1953) tra Roma e New York: dal divisionismo aristocratico al ritratto borghese, Isola del Liri 2016, p. 89, fig. 54.

Pumpkin seller is to be considered one of Arturo Noci’s most significant paintings and represents a decisive turning point in his production, both in terms of the choice of subject and technical execution. In order to fully understand the value of the work in relation to the artist’s career, it is necessary to take a step back and retrace the salient points of his research up to 1920, the year in which the painting under scrutiny was created. Born into a family of artists in Rome, Arturo Noci began his career at a young age, making his debut at exhibitions in the capital in 1897. He soon established himself as one of the most appreciated Italian figure painters, thanks also to his constant presence at the Venice Biennale, where he exhibited without interruption from 1901 to 1922. Fascinated by international portraiture, in particular the English portraiture of James Whistler, John Singer Sargent and John Lavery, Noci always favoured an elegant and refined style, thus attracting the attentions of high society, who showed an appreciation for the muffled and reassuring atmospheres of his paintings. The notoriety he achieved in this context earned him numerous commissions for important portraits, including one of Rama V, King of Siam, painted in 1907. The year before, in a review of the Esposizione Nazionale di Belle Arti in Milan, the critic Ugo Ojetti had described him as ‘the greatest, if not the only, Roman portraitist’ 1.
During the first five years of the 20th century, he began experimenting with Divisionist technique, then deepening it with greater conviction from 1910 onwards, when he adopted a tessellated touch, achieving elegant chromatic harmonies, often focused on warm tones. During the years of the Roman ‘Secession’ (1912-1917), of which he was also a leading figure as a member of the steering committee, his painting was described as ‘aristocratic Divisionism’2 by Enrico Prampolini, who, albeit with critical intent, provided a particularly apt definition of his technique. While he continued to pander to the demands of high society and even the world of show business, producing portraits of famous film divas such as Lyda Borelli (1914) and Soava Gallone (1916), Noci began to experiment with new technical solutions, seeking a bolder painting style in which the divided touch lost scientific rigour and was alternated with freer, broader and faster brush strokes, thus conferring an unprecedented centrality to the pictorial gesture.
Even after the experiments of the ‘Secession’ period, after the First World War, Noci continued to receive numerous commissions for worldly portraits. However, his painting underwent a profound transformation: a new focus on light and solidity of volume almost seemed to conceal an impatience with the Art Nouveau decorativism of the previous years. This change was evident to the critics when he resumed exhibiting at the Venice Biennale. The works presented in the 1920 edition – the first after the break in the World War – seemed to reveal some tangency with the pursuits of the artists of the so-called ‘return to order’, with subjects far removed from the elegant production, whose prissy connotations had sometimes been disapproved by the critics. With regard to the paintings exhibited in Rome in 1920, Arturo Lancellotti noted how ‘this artist, who had already made his name and his clientele for many years, gives us a noble example of disinterested love for art, not hesitating to move away from the usual technique, which had brought him honours and money, in order to express himself with newer and more tasteful procedures’3. The following year, speaking about Noci in a review on the Biennale in Naples, Guido Guida spoke of a ‘new youth, rich in colouristic achievements and happy expression ’4. Enthusiastic about continuing in this direction, the Roman painter began to paint interior scenes, landscapes and portraits of housewives and labourers of the land, caught in daily activities, with a monumentality that until then had only been reserved for high society. To this production belongs the Pumpkin Seller, painted on the island of Pellestrina, as the location in the bottom left-hand corner attests. Noci went there in the early autumn of 1920, as documented in a letter of good wishes sent on 5 October to the painter Cipriano Efisio Oppo for his wedding5. The work, of which a photograph in the artist’s archive bears an autograph inscription with the evocative alternative title By the Venetian Laguna, was exhibited in 1921 at the first Biennale in Rome, together with five other paintings, four of which were also executed on Pellestrina. The figure of the saleswoman, bathed in a dazzling light, stands majestically with a statuesque manner, her gaze concentrated towards an indefinite point on the horizon: although in its search for aesthetic value the painting is free of any social intent, we are now far removed from the crepuscular grace of his earlier works. Noci here finally achieves free and deeply inspired painting, marking the culmination of his artistic maturity.
The painter himself was so enthusiastic about Noci’s production that he presented it at other subsequent exhibitions, such as the Promotrice in Turin in 1922, where with his oil painting Tombolo, a portrait of an elderly woman intent on embroidering in an interior, he won the gold medal. This was his last important success in Italy before his departure for New York, where he arrived in 1923 to move permanently.

1 U. Ojetti, Attraverso l’Esposizione: pittori e pitture, in ‘Corriere della Sera’, 23 May 1906, p. 3.
2 E. Prampolini, Secessione, Prima Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte. Rome 1913, in ‘L’artista moderno’, 1913, a. 12, pp. 149-155.
3 A. Lancellotti, La 89th Mostra d’Arte della ‘Società Amatori e Cultori’, in ‘Emporium’, 1920, vol. LI, no. 305, p. 253.
4 G. Guida, La prima Biennale d’Arte a Napoli, in ‘Emporium’, 1921, vol. LIV, no. 322, p. 197.
5 F. Benzi, Materiali inediti dall’Archivio di Cipriano Efisio Oppo, in ‘Bollettino d’arte’, 1986, n. 37-38, p. 181.

Manuel Carrera