Alpine landscape (1915)

Signed lower left: “Cesare Maggi 915”

Exhibitions: Exhibition of the Artists’ Circle and LVII of the Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts in Turin

Bibliography: Exhibition of the Artists’ Circle and LVII of the Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts 1915-1916. Catalogue of Works, Turin 1915, p. 9 no. 115

Notes: A work described in the catalogue as “a skilfully harmonious symphony of candour and blue”.

Provenance: private collection

Born in Rome, Maggi’s first movements were linked to his parents’ profession as actors: it was in Florence that he began his classical studies, but from 1896 he began to frequent the studio of the famous portrait painter Vittorio Corcos. After a brief interlude in Naples, following the teachings of Gaetano Esposito, he returned to Florence where he made his debut in 1898 at the local promotrice. It was 1899, however, the year of the radical turning point: a few months after Segantini’s death, Alberto Grubicy set up a large monographic exhibition in Milan dedicated to the Arcense painter, which was visited by the artist.

It is the painter himself, in a later memoir collected by the critic Ugo Ojetti, who recalls that clamorous encounter: ‘The miracle happened in 1901 [read 1899, ed.] when I was able to see Segantini’s paintings in Milan, at the exhibition prepared by Grubicy in the Permanente building, the first of which was the Trittico. From that moment on, I had but one aim in life: to go and live in Maloja, to look at and study for real the mountains where Segantini had worked and on top of which he had died. And in the same year, 1901, I managed to settle in Maloja, at the Osteria Vecchia, right in front of Segantini’s chalet. From up there I began to send Grubicy many mountain paintings and many drawings that had just been raised by a little colour: and the paintings and drawings began to have some luck. […] In 1904, I took a wife and settled in La Thuile, some forty kilometres from Aosta. Up there, I painted the painting Mattino di festa.”[1]

Maggi’s vivid words recount a feverish two years: after four months spent at Maloja, in the autumn of 1900 the painter temporarily settled in Milan and Alberto Grubicy, by then engaged in a commercial activity devoted to the promotion of Italian Divisionist painting after Segantini’s death, put him under contract. The merchant’s commercial strategy, which was indeed not very liberal when it came to leaving room for the painters of his ‘stable’ to operate autonomously, saw Maggi in a privileged position: he had greater sales and exhibition freedom as he was freed from too strict an exclusivity, but at the same time he was present at the most important exhibitions organised by Alberto, especially those of an international scope such as the Salon des Peintres Divisionnistes Italiens of 1907. [2] Inserted into the commercial and advertising fabric of the Grubicy Gallery, Maggi soon established himself in the wake of the Segantini myth. 1905, after his move to La Thuile, was the year of his first great Venetian success with Mattino di festa which was bought by an Australian gallery. From this point of view, 1907 marked the most important year for the young painter who, only a few years earlier, had intentionally embraced not only the Divisionist technique, in a declination specifically derived from the re-elaboration of the Segantini model, but a specific thematic strand, that of the high mountains, which linked him to the common experiences of artists such as Carlo Fornara, who was also strongly marked by the ascendancy of the painter from Arcena.

Some fundamental masterpieces date from these years: the already mentioned Mattino di festa, La Slitta o L’ultimo fieno and La prima neve, exhibited at the 1907 Biennale. It was precisely La prima neve that would sanction Maggi’s official recognition with the purchase of the work by the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome. The Venetian success, at the same time, was reflected in the excellent critical reception Maggi received when he participated in the Parisian exhibition organised by Alberto Grubicy De Dragon. The Parisian critics highlighted in the Roman painter’s work a profound emotional component that arose not only, and not so much, from the chosen subjects – one thinks of Melanconia del sole (1906, Tortona, Il Divisionismo) – but from the highly refined luministic orchestration and the characteristic chromatic choices capable of conferring a strong evocative capacity on the landscape detail described with meticulousness but transcended by the rhythmic and compositional chords.[3]

The first decade of the century saw Maggi’s personal declination of Divisionism and his individual reworking of the poetics of the mountain undoubtedly marked and stimulated by the example of Segantini. Maggi’s mountain, it should be emphasised, is not Segantini’s cosmogonic mountain, it is a mountain – and nature – perceived in its naturalness, outside of any symbolic interpretation, and aestheticised. Compared to the evocativeness and even the symbolic-naturalistic drama of Segantini’s landscape, Maggi – as Nino Oxilia notes – studies ‘the mountain with humble love, love and humility that reveal themselves in a significant characteristic of his fascinating art, I mean the sensitive tendency to render the grandiosity of nature in the face of living beings. In almost all of his works we find a relationship, a deliberate parallel between man and nature: a parallel from which nature leaps out as if in a gigantic longing, while man and things also seem to shrink even more in its face’. [4] The possibility of allowing this inherent magnificence of the mountain scenery to emerge and decant finds its explication in a process of aesthetisation, of formalisation of the natural datum that passes through the adoption of the divided technique and characteristic compositional cuts, extraordinarily open and wide, that allow the painter to evoke and transfer onto the canvas the sense of the physical and spatial grandeur of the mountain as a poetic narration. The communication of the poetry of place passes, of course, through colour. The adoption of divided painting, studied on Segantini’s work, is bent to a personal technical reinterpretation that Maggi elaborated within the 1910s in order to achieve the highest results of brightness and luminosity of colour, not skimping on the use of waxes to finish the pictorial surfaces with the aim of enhancing the brightness of the pigments. The full-bodied colour, applied with long-line brushstrokes, gives an intense materiality to the paint film: the research on the decomposition of the colour is thus enhanced by the impastos that in their tactile evidence contribute to the luminous exaltation of the tone and the underlining of the decorative value of the ductus that is imposed by the tight linear rhythms. From this point of view, Maggi’s work – far from exhausting itself in a continuation of stylistic elements of Segantini’s matrix – was part of that reconsideration of the expressive potential of the divided touch that, in the early years of the 20th century, constituted the main road for many artists born in the 1980s capable of maintaining an attitude marked both by a profound experimentalism – both in the forcing and exaggeration of certain aspects of technique, as is the case for Maggi with the emphasis on colours and the tactile values of the ductus and impasto – and in an overcoming of it.

In Maggi’s specific case, it was the first half of the second decade of the 20th century that marked a moment of fundamental linguistic reflection: Divisionism, in the artist’s personal interpretation of it, was no longer a univocal choice and the painter delved into different research, progressively abandoning a strict application of divided colour, even though he produced masterpieces such as the very measured L’ombra (1914, private collection) and concise Alpine visions such as Sentori d’Inverno (1913, Milan, private collection). Although this ‘abandonment’ has been much emphasised in the literature – Marini, who has extensively analysed Maggi’s artistic personality, believes that the gradual abandonment of the divided technique, in parallel with the physical detachment from the inspirational places of painting such as La Thuile, was a conscious avoidance of the ‘tired linguistic reiteration’ of a poetics in the process of being exhausted (Marini 1997, p. 15) – Maggi’s poetics did not change trajectory, remaining firmly rooted in the chromatic, luministic and sign-like principles that had characterised the previous season. In fact, the works realised from the early 1910s onwards, such as the monumental painting under examination, open up a season of great experimentalism, which lasted throughout the decade, and which did not take the form of an abandonment of Divisionism, but of a freer and more expressive interpretation of it that dissolved the strict Divisionist lexical structure, sometimes with a strong expressionist charge of the chromatic palette and pictorial sign. From this point of view, in Maggi’s work there appears to be a clear evolution towards the search for an outcome of luminous-chromatic synthesis achieved thanks to a free and broad brushstroke where recourse is made more frequently to form-colour, to a pictorial sign, that is, which is substantiated both as constructive form and as colour at the same time, capable in synthesis of overcoming the sign-chromatic fragmentation of divided painting. Similar achievements, in the same turn of the century, characterised the pictorial production of artists close, in terms of experience and technical sensitivity, to Maggi, such as Carlo Fornara who would turn, he too, to colour-form as the most effective means for the search for a more immediate expressiveness.

The work under examination, signed and dated 1915, represents one of the most significant results of Maggi’s last season in La Thuile – a locality abandoned by the painter in 1914 – and is in substantial continuity with the results achieved in the previous decade in terms of both the poetics of the mountain and compositional solutions. [5] From a structural point of view, the large canvas, in fact, reconnects to the alpine visions that had marked Maggi’s debut and affirmation on the European scene ten years earlier – such as Sulle alpi una sera d’autunno (On the Alps on an Autumn Evening ) of 1909, the setting of which was exhibited at the Venice Biennale, or the aforementioned La prima neve and Ultimo fieno ( The First Snow ) and Ultimo fieno (Last Hay ) of 1907 – and is in even tighter continuity with the works of the beginning of the decade such as Le Nuvole( The Clouds), L’ultimo Pascolo (The Last Pasture) and I casolari che attendono (The Waiting Cottages ) of 1911 where the painter’s tendency to dissolve the meticulous draftsmanship elaborated at the beginning is already fully manifest.

The scene is constructed on the basis of a broad view of the Alpine massifs structured, as always happens in the artist’s wide-ranging landscape visions, on the perspective lunge mediated by the foreground that guides the observer’s gaze towards the flight, in depth, of the mountains whose ascending rhythms conclude in the opening of the sky tinged with evening hues. The photographic cut of the scene, with the suggestion of a landscape that continues beyond the edges, contributes to increasing the effect of magnificence of the view built, moreover, on the basis of multiple vanishing points that direct the viewer’s eye both towards the compositional fulcrum, represented by the highest peak of the massif, and towards the lateral ones: Concealed in the landscape, in fact, diagonal axes are clearly perceptible, directing and structuring the lunge from right to left and vice versa, thus guaranteeing a wide-angle opening of the frame.

The management of this complex and composite perspective structure is, moreover, guaranteed and sustained by the chromatic texture in the judicious balance of warm and cold hues that, alternating, generate a constant optical effect of advance and retreat of the different planes and chromatic masses, thus suggesting an extraordinary tactile evidence of the individual landscape elements. This is also achieved thanks to Maggi’s predilection for painting with extremely textured and evident impasto: here too, the painter uses a differentiated layering in relation to the handling of the perspective breakthrough. On the very foreground, in fact, the pictorial material imposes itself through an extremely italic and abbreviated brushstroke, capable, however, of immediately and verisimilarly describing the sensation, even the material sensation, of pasture, rocks and the roughness of the terrain: the artist works the material not only with the brush, but with its wooden tip, literally digging and carving the superimposition of mixtures in order to generate a superficial movement that, thanks to the ridges of material, translates into an intense chiaroscuro fibrillation of the mixtures. The meticulous and minute Divisionist drafting is released in a texture of great formal evidence that is charged with an intrinsic expressiveness: the pure colours are spread with coruscating brushstrokes that stratify, overlap and let the tonal force of the tones decant. Intense reds, yellows, deep blues are deposited by the brush with a synthetic touch and each brushstroke contributes to the construction of form. Note, for example, the intense details of the grazing cows, the rocks or the figure of the cowherd sitting on the rock: it is these material brushstrokes that sketch out the figures in their mass values and, therefore, in their light and colour, preserving all the intensity of tone and timbre of the colour. A few touches of white serve to detect the points of maximum light on the silhouette of the grazing cow, while patches of blues and blues of varying intensity build up the volume of the animal and the luminous variation of the shadows on the dark coat. It is in this renewed sense of an agile and synthetic painting that is substantiated not by an abandonment of divisionism, but by a reinterpretation of it, an interpretation of it that tends to loosen the tight meshes of a tight and methodical declination of the principle in order to allow an immediacy of restitution of the optical-chromatic datum entrusted to the form-colour to burst forth.

The more minute and precise treatment of the foreground is counterbalanced by a progressive relaxation of the touch as the depths proceed: beyond the rocks that describe the perimeter of the pasture, the pictorial material becomes less tormented with long brushstrokes, always very dense and full of material, which proceed horizontally, emphasising the sense of flatness of the valley and the muffling of the atmosphere, precisely rendering the humidity and blurring of the vision of the landscape below. Maggi, at times, plays with the canvas, which emerges between the brushstrokes and acts as a chromatic and material counterpoint to the relief of the impasto. The lesser precision of the mark, the broader brushstroke, the deeper colours thus become a fundamental element in the visual translation of a different level of depth and, therefore, of clarity of vision that restores the moistness of the air of the valley crossed by the stream.

Progressing further, the brushstroke is further modified: it becomes more animated, more strident and more pronounced in the almost tactile description of the mountains that gradually rise towards the glaciers. The horizontal rhythms of the depressions are now counterbalanced by brushstrokes marked by ascending and diagonal rhythms that suggest the rise of the rocky walls, the protrusions and recesses of the slopes and the different concreteness of the rocks and grasslands. It is a brushstroke that not only restores the optical-perceptual appearance of the elements that make up the landscape, but literally constructs its form, defines its structure, precisely in its becoming form-colour in a synthetic and constructive conception of the pictorial sign. With extraordinary skill and mastery of the medium, Maggi succeeds in recreating the different substance of rocks and slopes by using a different ductus that softens or becomes sharper and more segmented in relation to what it describes. The versatility of this handling of mixtures emerges in all its power in the rendering of the snowy peaks and the sky: The fragmentary brushstrokes that synthesise the rocks are contrasted by the sinuous body of the variegated whites streaked with blue – in a chromatic tour de force played on tone-on-tone resolved by a painter specialised in the depiction of snow-covered landscapes – that render the surface of the snow while the touch finally relaxes in the veiled treatment of the sky where the brushstrokes are drained of matter, lose relief, become translucent to suggest only the luminous and chromatic depth of the sunset. Such a sign and material texture, far from exhausting itself in a virtuosity of brushstroke, responds, as we have said, to precise compositional and expressive needs: the materiality of the pigment, the perceptive visibility of the impasto and the ductus perform a fundamental constructive and perceptive function. It is the pictorial material that synthesises and restores to the observer the tactile value of what the artist represents; it is the impastos that arouse the perceptive sensation of the meadows, rocks and snows, to reinforce the perspective construction, to generate the perception of the atmospheric values that make the landscape real in terms that are not so much naturalistic as emotional. The work under examination is undoubtedly an example of the highest pictorial quality of one of Maggi’s last great alpine cantos, a painting where – compared to the later results of the late 1920s and 1930s marked by a progressive affirmation of a more limpidly naturalist vision – the contemplation of the landscape does not translate into a simple reproduction of it but in an emotional interpretation of it by means of a painting that, both in its luminous and chromatic outcome and in its material evidence, is charged with expressive values that transfigure the datum of reality into a lyrical interpretation of the landscape. It was precisely this capacity of the pictorial medium to become the first vehicle of an emotion that marked, in 1914, the reading of Maggi’s mountainous landscape by one of his most sincere admirers, a reading that excellently accompanies and unveils the emotional content of this hitherto unpublished work, to be counted among the great masterpieces of Cesare Maggi’s happiest artistic season: ‘The mountain with its regal mantle stands before us, proud of its gigantic limbs, stretched out over the immense plains among the flowing foliage of oaks and pines, amidst the long caresses of rivers and streams. Nature, sublimated by the poet’s love, takes on the propositions of a dream, and the rock rises to mingle with the clouds and the tiny man descends to mingle with the grasses of the valley. This that the painter has evoked in his paintings is no longer meant to be the destination of a harried tourist or an acrobatic mountaineer; instead, it can be the backdrop for a great heroic representation: for example, the scene to a Wagnerian hymn, such as Siegfried’s encounter with the mighty virgin daughter of Wotan in their great embrace’.[6]

Niccolò D’Agati

[1] U. Ojetti, I capricci del conte Ottavio, v. II, Milan, Treves 1909, p. 264.

[2] Catalogue du Salon des Peintres Divisionnistes Italiens organisé par la Galerie d’Art A. Grubicy de Milan, Paris 1907, p. 88 nn. 93-100

[3] ‘ La toile que M. Maggi a si justement et poétiquement intitulée: Mélancolie du soleil est, elle aussi, bien soigneusement traitée, mais qu’elle est donc impressionnante ! L’émotion que l’on ressent à la vue de ce tronc d’arbre dénudé, mort. dressant désespérément ses branches dépouillées sur un ciel d’hiver pâlement éclairé par un soleil noyé, l’emporte sur la monotonie d’une précision photographie’, L. de Lutèce, Petit Salons, “Notes d’art et d’archéologie”, XIX, 1909, p. 203. See also: ‘Cesare Maggi, lui, tire de la réalité des effets décoratifs étrangement saisissants : je voudrais ne pas oublier son Coucher de soleil sur le Cervin, ses visions de nuages sur les glaciers, la fluidité des atmosphères bleues qu’il affectionne. Cela est personnel, particulier’, G. Mourey, Exposition d’art italien moderne a Paris, “Les Arts”, no. 69, September 1907, p. 28

[4] N. Oxilia, Cesare Maggi and La Montagna, ‘Natura ed Arte’, XIX, no. 22, 15 October 1910, p. 654

[5] On the basis of Maggi’s exhibition appearances throughout 1915, it is believed that the work can be hypothetically identified in the painting Alpine Landscape, exhibited in Turin in 1915 and described as follows ‘Alpine Landscape, a skilful and harmonious symphony of candour and blue‘, in L’ Esposizione Natalizia al ‘Circolo degli Artisti’, ‘La Stampa’, 18 December 1915, p. 5.

[6] Gian Bistolfi, Un pittore della regal montagna (Cesare Maggi), ‘Noi e il Mondo’, IV, no. 1, 1 January 1914, p. 35.