The Window (1928-1930)

Exhibition: “Pro Cultura Fascista. II Mostra d’Arte”, Naples, February 1931.

Bibliography: Pro Cultura Fascista. II Mostra d’Arte, exhibition catalogue, no. 134; M. Picone Petrusa, Eugenio Viti 1881-1952, Naples, Paparo Edizioni, 2007, no. 73.

Representing the encounter between the pictorial tradition of 19th-century Neapolitan painting and the formal and stylistic developments of the 20th century, between post-Impressionist suggestions and the language of the Secessions, Eugenio Viti devoted a considerable part of his production to female portraits. The Window, a painting known until now only through a photograph conserved in the Viti Archive in Naples, which bears the author’s signature and the work’s title on the back, is a vivid example of Viti’s pictorial experimentalism at the turn of the Twenties and Thirties. This was the period of his greatest success, in which he participated in the most important Italian and international exhibitions. In 1930, he was described as a “magnificent painter”[1] in the magazine “Emporium”, which corresponded to the years in which this painting was executed. The refined woman portrayed in three-quarter view, in a simple black dress and wrapped in a white shawl, seated on a window sill, pensively observes the panorama that appears in front of her, from Monte Echia, a rocky hill of tuff in the Pizzofalcone district of Naples, where Eugenio Viti had his studio. In 1929, the painter exhibited the Monte Echia landscape at the Naples Trade Union Exhibition, again painted from his studio, but in the case of The Window, the presence of the model enriches the composition with an intimate and delicate humanity, particularly present in the works of these years. In fact, one of his most significant paintings, The White Album, is also from 1929. In a very similar position, but in an almost kaleidoscopic interior, his fiancée Olga D’Ippolito – who could correspond to the woman portrayed in the painting presented here – is depicted. Very similar is the elegant uncovered neck that, with soft, shining lines, leads to the dark hair gathered at the nape of the neck, and equally similar is the treatment of the light that rests on the ebony epidermis of the shoulders. A true characteristic of Viti, especially between the 1920s and 1930s, luminism represents for the artist the meeting point between the memory of the Neapolitan “verista” (realism) tradition and the Novecento experiments on shape and light, which lead directly back to the research of Felice Casorati and the dreamy dimension of Magic Realism. The brushstroke, loose and impressionistic in the landscape and in the rendering of the shawl fringes, becomes more balanced and studied in the synthetic research of volumes and colours that “denote a turning point of Viti towards the 15th-century painters”[2], where the accents of light and the elegantly dosed portions of colour give the portrait a contemplative and almost metaphysical atmosphere. An open window on the world with a Piercer-Francesque flavur, skilfully updated to the 1920s’ Dèco sensibility.

[1] G. Artieri, Cronache napoletane. La II mostra sindacale – Critiche e posizioni – “Novecentisti” e vecchia guardia – La pittura e la scultura, “Emporium”, LXXII, 431, p. 311.

[2] Ibidem.