Telemaco Signorini, international artist and dandy committed ISSN 1127-4883 BTA - Telematic Bulletin of Art, October 9, 2009, No 538
http://www.bta.it/txt/a0/05/ bta00538.html
In Padua, until January 31, 2010, you can visit the exhibition "Telemaco Signorini and painting in Europe" , edited by Fernando Mazzocca, exhibition spaces Palazzo Zabarella. The exhibition compares the work of Telemachus Signorini - one of the "Macchiaioli best known at international level - with some works of European masters of his time, from Degas to Tissot, Decamps, Troyon, Corot, Courbet and Rousseau. An exhibition celebrating the decade-long activities of the fourteenth-century Palazzo Zabarella venue with an international artist, or almost unique, among Macchiaioli to enjoy in life and successful European market.
BABTISTE JEAN-Camille Corot, Landscape with a Lake , 1860-1873, oil on canvas, cm. 53 x 65.5 cm (The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg Photograph, © The State Hermitage Museum).
Telemaco Signorini (1835-1901) a leading exponent of Macchiaioli among the most fervent and the most "angry", the protagonist of the Tuscan and European bourgeoisie, was a refined intellectual, an artist innovative spirit and the reality and the society in which he lived. Italy was recently established, the bourgeoisie rose to political power and the second industrial revolution was at hand.
Fiorentino origin and son of John Signorini view painter, painter of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, animated those feverish years of art with a new painting of light and atmosphere of European realism. It is perhaps the only truly international, Italian painter of his time, a true cosmopolitan spirit, willing and able to relate to compete with other intellectuals and artists.
Telemaco Signorini, Castiglioncello Pascoli, 1861, oil on canvas, cm. 31 x 76 (Private Collection, Courtesy of Piero Dini).
in Florence was a frequent visitor to the Caffè Michelangelo, a meeting place for many young artists, where they exchanged their ideas, where the critic Diego Martelli coined the term Macchiaiolo and where they founded the group of the artistic movement that will influence the French Impressionists.
Macchiaioli The movement has developed in Florence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century made the impressions received from life with splashes of color of light and dark. They used a poetic realist as opposed to Romanticism, Neoclassicism and the academic purism, where the light was the trigger of an innovative and artistic revolution that then involve all the best expressions of the twentieth century.
Signorini frequented the salons of many intellectuals as the poet Mary Robinson, Violet Page (Vernon Lee) and almost certainly John Singer Sargent. Asseduo also attended the Paris intellectual Troyon, Corot, Degas, Zola, and which participates in all major exhibitions. Spirit curious traveler stays in Borgone, Switzerland and Great Britain. A refined dandy, frequenter of the salons à la page , intellectual snob that he preferred "the imperfect intellect" than the "perfect mediocrity."
EDGAR DEGAS, Dans un café (L'Absinthe) , 1875-1876, oil on canvas, cm. 92 x 68.5 (Paris, Musée d'Orsay, legs Isaac du comte de Camondo, 1911, © RMN (Musée d'Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski).
of him saying that "there is nothing sacred to the infernal mouth", also space in poetry and fiction with his celebrated writings caricaturist and caricature to the Caffè Michelangelo it reflects criticism and the art of Macchiaioli through caricatures, and Zibaldone where pasted cutouts of their articles of art criticism with graphic illustrations taken from newspapers of the time (of his paintings, engravings, etchings, cartoons), and drew his own hand in ink poems , starlings, autobiographical reflections, caricatures.
The exhibition in Padua Signorini compares with international colleagues, without losing strength and ability here then one of the great icons of the nineteenth century, L'Absinthe by Edgar Degas at the Museum today d'Orsay in Paris and presented for the first Impressionist exhibition of 1876, is set in the terrace coffee Nouvelle Athènes , meeting center of the Impressionist painters, in which the glimpse of Parisian life is represented through an original perspective cut, with all the tension of a moment of solitude and alienation. Or oil of Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, Landscape lake, the collection of 'Ermitage in St. Petersburg, where a landscape like this, relived in the memory and interpreted as a state of mind, definitely influenced Signorini, frequent visitor to the his study, to overcome the excessive realism of the first phase of the "stain" to paint a nuanced and emotional values. To Signorini then, it was very important friendship with Coubert that he has always been committed to the ideal of the artist to inspire them in addressing issues of social protest. In shows his portrait in prison Sainte-Pelagie in Paris in which Courbet autoritrae absolutely enthralling and original the prison where he was imprisoned for six months because of his complicity in the destruction of Vendôme column during the riots of the Paris Commune.
Telemaco Signorini, The towpath (detail), 1864, oil on canvas, cm. 54 x 173.2 (Private Collection, Courtesy Jean Luc Baroni Ltd).
From Signorini typical themes of the movement often went into seclusion for a more guided search on social issues and engaged in the work as the towpath of 1864, chosen as the emblem of the exhibition, which tells of the exploitation of workers and the lives of the marginalized. Embankment (towpath) Arno, five men drag something heavy, perhaps a barge, where the effort is perceived by the composition of light and shadow. Five men are mule-represented from top to bottom, with their backs broken by fatigue in the light of a sun that will not go down. With this strong "closes the final test phase of the stain. It is not just an example of a painting of a complaint, inspired by Courbet, the issue of the exploitation of workers and the social injustice, but a grand metaphor of human life, pain and fatigue of life. It 'an image that still retains its relevance and strikes us with its expressive violence carried out by the pure color "(F. Mazzocca).
Telemaco Signorini, The agitated in the hospital room of St. Boniface , 1865, oil on canvas, cm. 66 x 59 (Venice, Galleria Internazionale d'Arte Moderna Ca 'Pesaro).
Its revolutionary and critical spirit is also apparent in the work of the troubled hospital The hall of St. Boniface of 1865, owned by the International Gallery of Modern Art of Ca 'Pesaro in Venice, commonly known as "Shake," which deals with the issue of mental illness, insanity. The work, to cut the strong perspective and chiaroscuro of violence, was admired by Degas, but was harshly criticized and upset many in his first exposure because they carry scary attractions "abyss", according to the playwright Giuseppe Giacosa (1847 -1906). Signorini work is the exclusion of madmen locked up in hospitals as good as the exploited workers and prisoners.
Two examples of how art is no longer just the representation of beauty, but is also the complaint of a fact often forgotten, an art that is also a political prosecution and commitment. On the one hand the efforts of these men want to be a metaphor of human life, pain and fatigue of living, while across the gaze of the painter stops exaggerated attitudes of women locked in the room of the old mental hospital in Florence, in a dark and oppressive atmosphere marked by a livid light.
Telemaco Signorini painter, critic and intellectual, an extraordinary man who was able to tell us with his art, society and era.
Datasheet:
TELEMACO SIGNORINI AND PAINTING IN EUROPE
Padova, Palazzo Zabarella
19 September 2009 - January 31, 2010
Zabarella
Palace Via S. Francesco, 27 35121 Padova
www.palazzozabarella.it
Catalog:
Telemaco Signorini and painting in Europe (edited by Giuliano Matteucci, Fernando Mazzocca and Carlo Sisi)
Marsilio
size 24 x 29 cm, pp. 268 with 126 ill. in col and 40 b / w
year 2009 ISBN: 978-88-317-9840-2
Photo courtesy Studio Esseci, Padova