Emilio Longoni - (Seveso
1859-Milano 1932)
pastellista
For Longoni 1900 starts with the great Sola!. A work made with
blue, yellow, pink and orange hues, that has as a theme the pain of
a mother suffering for the death of a child; a real chromatic
revolution has been completed , a revolution that frees the
Divisionism of this artist from the remaining brown hues, and
underlines the renewal of his painting style, that now features for
thin colour lines, that follows or build volumes.
The young woman, whose face is denied to us, is depicted in
controluce, her hands twisted in a desperate gesture, lying on a
simple dark wooden table. The flowers that cover the grave, and the
candle suggest the thematic interpretation of the scene, while
conjugating the fidelity to the Realism with a controlled adhesion
to Symbolism.
Sola!, for whose title Longoni is in debt with Ada Negri, who had
published in” Fatalità” a lyric with the same title (1892), is a
work that shares the instances of the last five years of the
century, but it is also a modern work, in which the artist reveals a
new attention for decorative details. Inside a framework
trompe-l'oeil that Longoni squares with pastello, it is to be
noticed the happy descriptive insisting upon the ebony and ivory ,
metal and leather chair, a chair twice repeated, made in the
artisan laboratory of Carlo Bugatti, and that was an element of
furniture of the studio – house of Longoni. It is still the black
table with the motive with wolf teeth, the tapestry with geometrical
flowers, details of reality but that acquire a new meaning for their
importance in the whole scene.
The technique of the pastello, fundamental in the development of
our Divisionism, was by that time handled at the limit of
virtuosism, while respecting at the same time the technique of
colour division, with which Longoni dealt with the landscape between
light and darkness : look at the shadow of the chair, the
transparences in the curtains, painted with a thick texture that
sometimes follow the line of the drawing, like in the dress of the
mother and in her hair in controluce, or that become colourful and
vibrating dust, like in the glimpse of landscape beyond the glass
and in the decorated tapestry.
Since the first years of 1900 Longoni showed he had deeply
understood the peculiar balances of high mountain landscape. Here it
became different the perception of the time, of the space, of the
light. As true climbers know, on a high level , time is enlarged by
the effort needed to walk for a few metres, and enlarged is the
space, too. Colours change, and from vivid and neat colours, in a
dustless and vapour less air, they melt in a range of soft colours,
from light grey, to light blue, to pink, in an unreal atmosphere.
Longoni became master of the rhythm of mountains in works such as
Alba, while geared towards the observation and the objective
delivering of landscape, translated with a complete handling of the
principles of Divisionism, that was by that time an obedient
linguistic instrument that developed the naturalistic data in
symbols, the beauty of uncontaminated nature in universal timeless
value.
To the rare visitors who, at the end of his life, Longoni welcomed
in his studio, he confessed that his paintings were never finished:
he kept on elaborating, for a long time, obsessed by the deepness of
vision, as if the support of the cloth and the space of the object
painting where no longer enough. He repeated that it was necessary
to go beyond the canvas, to be able to imagine oneself dived in the
landscape, au de là of the painted surface.
At a certain moment, when Segantini e Pellizza were dead at the
beginning of the century, Divisionism was considered avanguarde,
Attilio Pusterla had emigrated to America, also Sottocornola had
died in 1917 and Morbelli in 1919, whereas Previati e Nomellini had
diverted towards decoration and D’Annunzio influence, and Vittore
Grubic had left his activity as a painter, only Longoni stayed on
to carry to the final consequences the experiences that had had a
common theoretical origin.
( Translate by Irene De Angelis Curtis )
