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Divisionism/Neo-Impressionism: Arcadia and Anarchy Hardcover – 21 May 2007

4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 5 ratings

This book explores the optically vibrant paintings executed by the Italian Divisionists during the late 19th century and, for the first time, examines their relationship to Neo-Impressionism. Artists from both these movements subscribed to a painting technique rooted in colour theories, held radical, left-wing political views and pursued similar subject matter, from idyllic landscapes to societys problems. Bursting with reproductions by the genres leading proponents, this catalogue also includes essays by noted scholars that shed new light on this hitherto neglected area of European art history.
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About the Author

Vivien Greene is an Associate Curator at the Guggenheim Museum.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Guggenheim Museum Publications; 1st edition (21 May 2007)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 136 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0892073578
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0892073573
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 22.9 x 1.5 x 22.9 cm
  • Customer reviews:
    4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 5 ratings

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  • Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 15 December 2013
    The Italian Divisionists of the 1890s and early 1900s were attacked by critics at the 1891 Brera Triennale and their style equated to a febrile disease. Their radical and progressive science-led theory, so-called for its separation of colour into individual dots or strokes of pure complementary colours, had influenced the Neo-Impressionists, notably Seurat and Signac, and led to the Italian Futurists of 1909-16.

    In 2007 an exhibition held at the Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, brought together Divisionist and neo-Impressionist works from public and private collections to examine the similarities and divergences between their aesthetics, motifs and symbolism, and the political perspectives of their artists.

    The exhibition presents 41 works, reproduced as colour plates. In addition to a Selected Bibliography and an Index of Reproduction, 4 informative essays are presented, illustrated in colour by 16 figures: `Painted Measles: The Contagion of Divisionism in Italy', by Vivien Greene, `Divisionism, Neo-Impressionism, Socialism', by Giovanna Ginex, `The Divisionists and the Symbolist Circle', by Aurora Scotti Tosini and `Paris, 1907;: The Only Salon of Italian Divisionists', by Dominique Lobstein, which includes the lay-out of the Salon. The plates are divided into five groups; `Light', `Landscape, `Rural Life', `Social Problems' and `Symbolism'.

    According to Greene, the optical and chromatic studies of Chevreul, 1839, and Rood, 1879, were first adopted by Neo-Impressionists in France, Belgium and The Netherlands. The Italian painters first learned about the technique through art journals and then, from 1887, through the enthusiastic Vittore Grubicy De Dragon. The emerging Divisionists were criticised for their association with leftist politics, their distorted forms, `diseased' strokes and the implicit analogy between the Italian State and its art. The critics also used the concept of degeneration, the painters' mental decay and abnormality being responsible for their art. However, such comments were given short shrift by the writer, Gustavo Macchi and other supporters.

    The Neo-Impressionists' depiction of light is represented by Albert Dubois-Pillet's "Under the Lamp", c. 1888 and van Rysselberghe's "Portrait of Émile Verhaeren in his Study", 1892. The Pointillist seascapes of Seurat, "Evening, Honfleur", 1886, and "Seascape at Port-en-Bessin, Normandy", 1888, Maximilien Luce, "Seashore, Toulinguet Point", 1893, and Signac, "The Beacons at Saint-Briac, Opus 210", 1890, are contrasted with later, Divisionist, works, such as "Sea of Mist", 1895, and "Winter", 1898, both by Grubicy De Dragon. Giovanni Segantini's "Spring Pastures", 1896, and "Glacier", 1905, by Emilio Longoni, are both painted on significantly larger canvases.

    Peasants, often women, at work were a key feature of both the Neo-Impressionists ("Peasant with Hoe", 1882, and "Farm Women at Work", 1882-83, both by Seurat, "Les Anderlys, The Washerwomen", 1886, by Signac, "The Harvest", 1887, by Charles Angrad, "Apple Picking at Éragny-sur-Epte", 1888, and "Woman Breaking Wood", 1890, both by Pissarro, and "The Grape Harvest (Var)", 1892, by Henri-Edmond Cross) and the Divisionists ("Return from the Woods", 1890, by Segantini, "Dawn", 1890-91, and "For Eighty Cents!", 1895, both by Angelo Morbelli, and "Sea and Frost", 1908-1910, by Plinio Nomellini)

    The left-wing, even anarchist, politics of the Divisionists led to a focus on the working class, typified by "The Fourth Estate", 1898-1901, by Giuseppe Pellizzada Volpedo, not in the exhibition, "The Orator of the Strike", 1890-91, and "Reflections of a Starving Man", 1894, both by Emilio Longoni, "Ambassadors of Hunger", 1891, and "The Drowned Man", 1894, both by Pellizza da Volpeda, "Piazza Caricamento in Genova", 1891, by Nomellini, "The Dawn of the Worker", 1897, by Giovanni Sottocornola and "Holiday at the Pio Albergo Trivulzia", 1892, by Angelo Morbello. In contrast, Neo-Impressionists painted fewer and smaller works, "Man Washing", 1887, by Luce, Jan Toorop's , "After the Strike" c. 1886-87, and "The Steelworks in Charleroi (Factory Chimney)", 1896 by Luce).

    The Divisionists convergence with Symbolism is evident from "The Procession", 1893-94, "Lover's Stroll", 1901-02, and "Ring Around the Roses", 1906/1907-08?, all by Pellizza da Volpeda (the latter completed by Angelo Barabino with a detail being illustrated on the front cover), "Dance of the Hours", c. 1899, "Day Awakens Night", c. 1905, and "The Dream", 1912, all by Gaetano Previati, "The Sound of the Stream", 1902-03, by Longoni and "Vanity", 1897, by Segantini.

    A very well produced catalogue with excellent essays and well-chosen works.
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  • Kenneth Hughes
    4.0 out of 5 stars Neo-Impressionism and Italian Divisionism
    Reviewed in the United States on 24 July 2015
    This nicely designed little book was published to accompany the exhibition at the German Guggenheim in Berlin from January to April 2007 and then at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York from April to August. It is not nearly as comprehensive a survey as the “Radical Light” exhibition and catalogue that followed it in 2008/2009 at the National Gallery in London and then the Kunsthaus in Zürich (see the reviews on this website). That show presented a much broader collection of Italian Divisionists, but only them, and made no attempt to juxtapose the Divisionists with their concurrently painting counterparts, the Neo-Impressionists in France and Belgium, as did this earlier Guggenheim exhibition. But one can far better understand both Divisionism and Neo-Impressionism by referring the one to the other, and that is what this Berlin/New York show had in mind. There was much that united the two schools and much that separated them. For the most part, they had the same interest in the “scientific” basis of painting in nineteenth-century theories of optics and color and read many of the same fundamental texts. They both rejected the conservative politics and complacent culture of the bourgeoisie, looking forward to its eventual replacement in an anarchic society of the future, and sought to make art an instrument of social change. And both, paradoxically it seems, developed a deeply Symbolist strain, which for Divisionism was well explored in both the Berlin and London exhibitions and for Neo-Impressionism was thoroughly documented in the recent Phillips Collection show “Neo-Impressionism and the Dream of Realities” (see the reviews). “Arcadia & Anarchy” is thus an appropriate subtitle for this volume: both the arcadian and the anarchic strains are fundamental to both tendencies. Although the Italians and their more northern counterparts were aware of each others’ work, they had little first-hand experience of it, and their results diverged in a number of ways. The Italians, for example, readily accepted traditional forms of devotional painting and preferred somewhat larger-scale compositions and rather more dramatic rendering of scenes of political action, and their mark-making is almost universally distinguishable from that of their French colleagues: much finer in stroke, smaller in point and wispier in movement, so that at times it is hard to see how it conforms to the basic divisionist technique (a lower-case “d” here, to distinguish the technique from the movement; in a diary entry in 1910, Signac rather ungenerously complained that the Italians had stolen the word "divisionism" from “us,” i.e. the Neo-Impressionists).

    What they had in common and what divided them is easy to see from the works on exhibit. There are forty-one exhibition plates divided into thematic categories: “Light,” “Landscape,” “Rural Life,” “Social Problems,” and “Symbolism.” These are printed full-page, mostly in good color and excellent definition and supported throughout the texts by about fifteen companion illustrations, some of which are also full-page, as well as by several pages of full-bled enlargements. Among the Neo-Impressionists we find canvases of Angrand, Cross, Seurat, Signac, Camille Pissarro, Luce, and van Rysselberghe, and among the Italians there are Segantini, Morbelli, Previati, Longoni, and Pellizza da Volpedo. I did not see the exhibition in either venue, so I don’t know how it was hung, but the catalogue presentation obviously attempts to juxtapose the paintings to maximum effect. The “Light” section, for example, has just three works: Segantini’s “Portrait of Carlo Rotta” (1897) seated at his desk and illuminated by a lamp; Rysselberghe’s iconic “Portrait of Émile Verhaeren in His Study” (1892), also with a desk-appropriate illumination; and Albert Dubois-Pillet’s “Under the Lamp” (1888), which pictures only a lamp illuminating some objects on a table. The section is introduced by a greatly enlarged detail of the third painting, in which the painstaking divisionist facture is so clear one immediately understands Pissarro’s decision not to continue in the mode because he found it too time-consuming. Frequently there are facing pages that cast light on one another, as two marinescapes of Seurat (“Evening, Honfleur,” 1886) and Vittore Grubicy de Dragon (“Sea of Mist,” 1895)—both of them gorgeous and an excellent illustration of the two different kinds of mark-making—or the superb juxtaposition of Seurat’s “Farm Women at Work” (1882-83) and Angelo Morelli’s “For Eighty Cents!” (1895), which both show women bent in labor over cultivated rows. There was some disappointment to me in the four scholarly essays introducing the paintings, in that they are focussed almost exclusively on the Italian component of the exhibition and relegate the Neo-Impressionist side to only occasional mention. But I did find them quite informative. Vivien Greene, who curated the show and is now Curator of Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Art at the New York Guggenheim (and who was partly responsible for their great Italian Futurism exhibition last year), has an excellent introduction discussing the resistance to the movement after its initial presentation at the first Brera Triennale in Milan in 1891, and there are two further essays on Divisionism and Socialism and Divisionism and Symbolism. To conclude, the Musée d’Orsay curator Dominique Lobstein has a little sketch of the French resistance to the Italian movement (and to Italian art in general) and a catalogue of the 1907 exhibition of the Divisionists, when the Dante Alighieri Society of Paris finally forced some awareness upon the public. There is no index, but there is a small selected bibliography, which is very good in its references to Italian sources. Altogether, a quite useful book both for its fine illustrations and informative texts, well recommended to those interested in late nineteenth-century art.
  • Marbolt Jasper Transeptinker
    4.0 out of 5 stars Four Stars
    Reviewed in the United States on 28 January 2016