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| "Clouds Over Equinox,"1935,Oil on Canvas,26x47",Gerald Peters Gallery |
One of my favorite 20th Century painters is Luigi
Lucioni, who created meticulous still lifes, landscapes and portraits in a
highly personal manner that he likened to classical realism derived from his
study and worship of the early Italian Renaissance masters. Lucioni also produced masterful etchings and
watercolors that brilliantly showcase his affinity for precise line work.
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“Resting Athlete,1938,Oil on Canvas,43 ½ x
48",Gerald Peters
Gallery
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One goofy reason I like this wonderful painter is because
it’s easy to remember his dates. Born in
1900 in Malante, Italy,
moved with his parents to America
in 1910 and died in New York City
in 1988. Painters love to check the
dates on other painters to see how they measure up with their own creative progress. He did that one before he was 30? Holy Cow!
I’m 100 years old and I’ve accomplished nothing! When a painter’s career straddles the start
of a century, you have to “do the math” in a serious way to figure out their
career landmarks.
I also like the fact that Lucioni had absolutely no interest
at all in photography, even though his work was often described unknowingly as “photographic.” I like the fact that his painstaking style
was consistent in all the work he produced. I like the fact that he loved opera, which in
his case led him to hobnobbing with a lot of celebrities, including Henry
Fonda, who received some painting instruction from him. I didn’t like learning, though, that Lucioni came
to dislike Rubens and other brush stroke painters, even though his first painting
teacher was William Starkweather, who had studied with Joaquin Sorolla.
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“Pattern of Trees,”1943,Watercolor,13x20 ½",www.antiques.com
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But most sincerely, I am in awe of Lucioni’s superb
draftsmanship, and fascinated by his highly personal choices regarding color,
subject matter and design, the latter under the early influence of the skewed
perspectives of Cezanne, whom he considered a great artist. But he loved most the early Italians, especially
Piero della Francesca, for their purity of line and form.
I’ve never seen another still life painter use such distinctive,
harmonious color combinations to such impressive effect on objects that are so perfectly
rendered from nature. He loved browns,
ochres, lemon and dusty yellows, olive and deep greens and mauves, and
obviously gave careful consideration to the color scheme in planning his extremely
realistic works. No brown sauce or
commonplace color for him.
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“Harmony in Minor Key,c. 1974,Oil on Canvas,22x26",www.godelfineart.com
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His tabletop still lifes feature ordinary, often unusual household
objects and superbly painted draperies with a multitude of folds in them. Folds are very hard to paint convincingly, and
most of us eliminate them whenever possible.
That’s one reason you see so many flat backgrounds in works done by
today’s painters. “Keep it simple” could
be construed to be the mantra of the lazy painter. I’ve been advised on several occasions to put
more draperies in my own still lifes, but I paint them only once in a great
while because of the difficulty in getting the folds to look right. Lucioni obviously embraced the challenge of
painting folds, a common task for the early Italians.
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| "Dominant Colors,"1956,Oil on Canvas,20x28",www.antiques.com |
In Lucioni’s work, a single lemon or a small grouping of
fruit placed judiciously often serve as significant color accents in the
prevailing tonal theme. He didn’t paint
the ordinary very often. For example, he
frequently painted the devil out of a bouquet of dried dieffenbachia leaves in
an earthenware jug or a potted, green dieffenbachia in the midst of cascading drapery,
finding beauty in the overall color scheme he selected. He liked to paint oddly shaped pots or
bottles and place things on their side for design purposes.
Many second-rate artists like to flippantly respond “a
lifetime,” when innocently asked how long it takes them to finish a
painting. But we are told that Lucioni worked
nearly a month on each still life. He
was obsessed with the beauty of accurate line and form, and he had the patience
to study and render in exacting detail all the essential facts from nature that
would bring life to his paintings.
Rendering crockery, fruit and other objects with
well-defined contours, as Lucioni did, can sometimes result in a “cut-out”
look, an opinion of some of my painter friends about his work. But I think his sharp contours are perfectly
in keeping with his reverence for the line work of the early Italians, and all
the objects he paints sit comfortably in their artfully staged environments.
Lucioni never tried to fool himself or the viewer with
tricks to overcome drawing difficulties, like smudging form into form, or
employing the much-abused concept of lost and found edges so fashionable with many
of today’s realists, who misinterpret their occasional use by the older
painters. He tackled the most difficult
passages, such as where shadows and cast shadows of juxtaposed objects come
together, and succeeded in keeping separate the firm contours of each object, just
the way close observation with the human eye would reveal.
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“Village of Stowe,
Vt.,”1931,Oil on Canvas,23 ½x33 ½",Minneapolis Institute of Arts
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Lucioni’s attractive, airy Vermont
landscapes, with their precisely outlined birch trees and barns and distant
hilltops, stand apart from those executed by most other landscape painters, who
adopt a broader, less focused manner of painting the great outdoors. His landscape etchings and watercolors most
clearly exhibit his love of the precise line.
Lucioni spent summers in Vermont
and the rest of the year in New York City,
painting seven days a week, holidays included, with opera music playing in the
background. By his own account, Lucioni
painted every day from 9 a.m until noon and from 1
p.m until 4. “I enjoy
painting, so for me painting is not work,” he once said. When he wasn’t working at his art, he enjoyed
the city’s rich musical life and the companionship of his beloved Scottish
terrier, the two other great loves of his life.
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“Two
Silos,”Etching,1942,Indianapolis Museum of Art
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Not many people are familiar with Lucioni’s art these days. A woman who moved to Vermont
after art school didn’t know he painted still lifes. And I didn’t know he painted landscapes until
I saw a show of his work at the Richard York Gallery in 1991. His etchings and watercolors were a complete
surprise to me until a few years ago.
Part of the reason may be that he kept to himself during his long career
as an artist, working right up until the very end. He had few artist friends, preferring the
company of musicians, and had long given up on entering juried competitions. “I find artists get along better if they are
separate rather than together,” he once said.
“There's always a kind of jealousy and all that sort of thing you know.”
The story was quite different early in his career. During the Great Depression, when other
artists were working for the WPA to get by, Lucioni was selling every one of
his carefully crafted paintings. He had
his first solo exhibition in 1927 at the Ferargil Gallery in New
York City. And
in 1932, he became the youngest contemporary painter to have a work purchased by
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, a still life titled “Pears with Pewter.”
During an oral history interview conducted by Robert Brown on
July 6, 1971 for the
Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art, Lucioni had some
interesting things to say about Realist painting and photography.
Lucioni said he tried to find “the thing that makes it real without
copying all the little trivial things. People
say I paint every leaf on the tree. I don't…I paint what I think is there. I mean I try to make it look as though it
belonged there, but very often when people look at my landscapes and look at
the painting I am doing, ‘Oh, you changed this, you changed that,’ they don't
realize that…you can't cope with nature, as you know, and therefore you can't
put in all the little things that nature can do so easily and you can't. So you
have to get the essentials of these things and that is my idea of realism…for
me nature is the greatest artist that ever lived, you know, and all the great
artists have tried to follow nature, well, [nature] can do so many things that
a brush can't do, I mean, for instance, how can you paint, well to begin with
you can't paint sunsets, you can't paint sunrises, you paint a blue sky, but if
you paint it blue it looks absolutely opaque where nature can have it
transparent. Nature is a great, great inspirer, but also a terrible tease for
an artist, but you do the best you can.”
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"Steeple Through the Birches,”1977-79,Oil
on Canvas,23x19",www.artfact.com
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He said his realism is “not a copy of nature, although lots
of people think so. But let them think so, it's alright. But the realism is
something else. First of all, you have to know what a thing looks like, what a
thing is made of…I studied the things that I painted, I studied the trees, I'd
go and look at them up close and then when I would go back I'd try to simplify
by a line or two. It doesn't always come off. But you try awfully hard to make a thing look
as though it was casual. But I don't
think there is anything casual in art.”
He said the goal of his carefully planned still life
paintings is to make the objects within “as absolutely alive as possible…even
more alive than they really do look like to you when you are looking at them.”
Asked how his work compares to photography, Lucioni replied:
“I don't think it compares with photography at all. People
say, ‘Oh you can take a photograph and make it look as good.’ You just can't,
to begin with. I don't think realism and photography have anything in common,
for my point of view, I may be wrong. In fact, I am really not a good
photographer. I can't take good snapshots or anything, and I never. . .People
say, ‘oh we can do that from a photograph.’ I never work from photographs. I
couldn't possibly work from a photograph…I cannot imagine a tree. I have to
study, I have to be in front of it in order to get it. See, that's one of my
limitations…you can't imagine something that you just don't know. I mean, you
have to know about it. But there are a lot of people who do work from memory,
but I am no good at that, I can't do that. I mean, it's as I say, it's my
limitation, but it's me and there's nothing I can do about it. I am too old now
to change, and I don't know if I would want to change or not.”
I understand completely this immensely gifted artist’s sincere,
fumbling attempts to describe the nearly indescribable act of painting from
nature, which stirs up so much emotion.
And I’m extremely happy to know that we share many of the same feelings
about the work. Like Lucioni, all I want
to do is make the things I paint look real on canvas. And I, too, am trying to do the best I
can.
