The Lily of Fire (1917)

Signed lower left:“Guido Marussig”

Exhibitions: Milan, Annual Exhibition of the Permanent Exhibition, 1917.

Bibliography: Società per le belle Arti ed Esposizione Permanente. Mostra Annuale, exhibition catalogue (Milan, 1917), p. 17, no. 11.

Guido Marussig, one of the leading figures on the Italian art scene in the early 20th century, stands out for his experimental approach, moving with confidence between different disciplines: from painting to decoration, illustration, engraving and architectural design. This multifaceted approach confirms  not  only  his  technical  skill,  but  also  his  profound understanding and interpretation of the modern European aesthetic canon, from Secession to Symbolism, from Divisionism to abstract art and the return to order. Although he was one of the leading figures of the Ca’ Pesaro Secession in Venice, he started participating in the Venice Biennale in 1905 — at the very early age of twenty — and for many other editions until 1948, standing out, especially in the 1910s, among the major artistic personalities of European symbolism, such as Franz von Stuck and Galileo Chini, with whom he exhibited in the famous Hall of Dreams in 1907.

Within a varied artistic itinerary rich in different influences, it was during these years that Marussig developed an idea of landscape imbued with a symbolic and at times dreamlike dimension, with innovative cuts and decorative syntheses based on Secessionist inspiration, sometimes combined with Divisionist ideas, especially from the mid-1910s onwards. The painting in focus, The Lily of Fire, is one of the first works exhibited by the artist in Milan after his move in 1916 and represents one of the rare and precious examples in which the author experiments with the divisionist technique. Presented at the annual exhibition of the Society for Fine Arts in 1917, it was immediately praised by critics for its “happy invention” and “sure decorative intuition”¹ which is reflected in the choice of one of the artist’s favourite settings, the night-time illuminated by sudden flashes of light. As early as 1914, at the Venice Biennale, Marussig had presented the painting now preserved in the Uffizi, The Fantastic Tree, in which a magical fountain of fireworks pierces the Venetian darkness above a group of gondola irons silhouetted against the light. The Lily of Fire shares with this painting not only the approach to the divisionist technique – in our case more meticulous and less pulverised – but also the construction of a geometric structure, increasingly present in his production in the years to come.

A balanced and rhythmic spatial arrangement that gives the composition a decorative dimension in which the chromatic structure is organised against a darker background, evocative of the images of Whistler, an artist to whom Marussig is particularly attached. An explosion of light that, however, in The Lily of Fire is managed through meticulous divisionist control in which each small dot of colour is combined with its complementary colour to create a precise texture, in which the chromatic  cascade  of  fireworks  creates  a  surprising scenographic effect, reflected in the title that evokes the image of a lily. In this case, Divisionism, rather than approaching the Italian dimension of painters such as Previati or Segantini, evokes the rigour of Seurat’s Pointillism, with which it shares spatial organisation, the clarity of geometric backgrounds, the insistence of contour lines and the rendering of artificial light in a nocturnal scene, capable of generating golden, purple, blue and green reflections. These aspects also correspond to Marussig’s contemporary graphic work, which, during his Milanese period, focused on woodcuts and illustration, collaborating with magazines such as ″L’Eroica″, ″Emporium″ and ″Le vie d’Italia″ and producing ex-libris and Art Nouveau-style advertising posters. The adoption of a marked synthesis, an incisive line and a sharp contrast between light and shadow can also be found in his paintings from the same period, characterised by highly personal solutions such as, in the case of the painting in question, the pattern of luminous golden rain falling elegantly to the ground, repeated in the structure of the arches in the background.

This is a very special garden, whose unmistakable composition can be found in that of Villa Guarienti on Lake Garda, whose characteristic hedges Marussig also reproduces in other works from the same period, including Lights and Shadows in the Guarienti Garden on Lake Garda, where the volumetric texture already seems to anticipate the geometric-metaphysical abstractions of the 1920s.

Elena Lago