Fregene (1927)

Signed lower right: “G. A. Sartorio Fregene MCMXXVII”

Provenance: private collection

Giulio Aristide Sartorio, one of the most important artists in Italy between the 19th and 20th century, also known for the international vocation of his rich production, is one of the main contributors to the diffusion of Pre-Raphaelite culture in Rome in the Symbolist season, but also a protagonist of the codification of the celebratory and official language in the public decoration of New Italy in the early 20th century. An artist of multifaceted talent, he is a refined interpreter of animalier painting, but also of war reportage, the landscape of the Roman countryside and the places he visited on his numerous trips to the East and Latin America. He was able to reach the peak of his expression in his last years of activity, between official assignments and a more intimate language elaborated in the so-called “Fregene cycle”, a beach a few kilometres from Rome, where the protagonists of his final and supreme painting are light effects and family affections.

Fregene, mixed media on cardboard from 1927, is precisely part of this production, the author’s precious swan song, a sort of heavenly testament in which the essence of a new expression and a new life is kept, albeit towards its closure. “Today, in palingenesis, I ask to express actuality and signify the smiles of optimism. In the hospital of Gorizia, the doctor Francesco Marani saved my right leg condemned to amputation, so that this surviving existence, surrounded as it is by a happy family formed after the war, seems to me an unexpected paradise”[1] .

Palingenesis, rebirth, an idyllic transition to a smiling, pure suavity are the sensations that Sartorio felt in the aftermath of the war experience and which he encapsulates in these last, luminous canvases dedicated to his family and the beach of Fregene. Fregene, with its characteristic and skilful agreements of luminous white, with the fluid freshness of the sea foam, with the wind shaking the waters and the gentle sands of the beloved beach of the Roman shoreline, constitutes a small and synthetic horizontal impression where the only human presence is a naked child sitting on the foreshore – reminiscent of the tender and dreamy bodies of his children Lidia and Lucio – who, while playing, sits and observes the sea in an intimate isolation of time and space. A painting of light and a conversation with nature and the soul, in which the sea, amidst infinite horizons and the simplicity of human feeling, still preserves the symbolist suggestions of the early 20th century, in which the genius loci is filled with allegories and meanings. But Fregene now, in the 1920s, became the favourite and golden summer resort of the people from Rome, where among the beaches and dunes Sartorio gave life to a painting made up of family affection and splendid seascapes: an enchanting narration of everyday life, with his wife Marga Sevilla and their children, his “unexpected paradise”[2] . The same naturalistic-elegant dimension he found in the paintings of Joaquín Sorolla (1863-1923), who was present at the Venice Biennale from 1895 to 1926. Works concentrated on the suspended levity of Spanish beaches that focus on the study of light, in its iridescent marine reflections or in the modelling of figures of children playing in the waves. It is precisely the memory of this energetic painting of light, accompanied by reflection on the everyday, that is evoked by Sartorio, with a particular focus on the private sphere, the human figure, the spiritual and naturalistic dimensions that come together in a harmonious whole and a subtle chromatism. A production that remained hidden for a long time, that of Fregene was rediscovered in an exhibition at the Galleria Emporio Floreale in Rome in 1973.

[1] G. A. Sartorio, Solo exhibition of the painter Giulio Aristide Sartorio, Milan, Bestetti & Tumminelli, p. n. n..

[2] G. A. Sartorio, Mostra personale del pittore Giulio Aristide Sartorio, Milan, Bestetti & Tumminelli, 1929, p. n. n.

Elena Lago