Ulvi Liegi between stain and impression in a painting that is an ode to color. The exhibition in Livorno

It is now more than 54 years since Giuliano Matteucci wrote that Ulvi Liegi ’s painting is “now finally recognized by all as one of the first voices of current modern art.” Yet despite the fact that it was one of the pivotal figures in the history of Italian art who uttered that vaticinium, particularly for the appreciation of Tuscan art between the 19th and 20th centuries, still in our contemporary times Ulvi Liegi’s name certainly struggles to appear alongside much better-known names in early 20th-century Italian art to which, according to Matteucci, he rightfully belonged, such as Lorenzo Viani, Ardengo Soffici and Ottone Rosai. For this reason we find particularly meritorious the exhibition An Original Artistic Language: Ulvi Liegi Interpreter of Light, which opened in the representative office of Castagneto Banca 1910 in Livorno on November 30, 2024, and will remain open until January 25, 2025. The new event is part of a successful series of exhibitions that have been promoted by the bank and curated by art historian Michele Pierleoni for several years now, and whose purpose is to highlight important Livorno and Tuscan artists.

This time, too, the purpose, though achieved with an exhibition contained in the number of paintings, does not seem to us betrayed. Meanwhile, because it has the merit of bringing back to the artist’s hometown an exhibition that had been missing for thirty-five years, displaying several nodal works in Liege’s artistic career, accompanying it with a sumptuous catalog, accompanied by numerous paintings, even those not exhibited, and by old and new essays capable of shedding light on multiple aspects of our artist’s art. The initiative sponsored by the Municipality of Livorno, the Jewish Community of the city to which Liegi was a shining member, the Livorno Foundation, from which three works on display come, and the Gruppo Labronico, of which the artist was the first president, is also followed by a special rearrangement of a room in the Giovanni Fattori Civic Museum entirely dedicated to Ulvi Liegi.

Ulvi Liegi is the anagrammatic pseudonym chosen by Luigi Moses Levi to sign his works. The artist, born in Livorno in 1858 to a well-to-do Jewish middle-class family, would later die in his hometown in 1939 in poverty, on the eve of a war he fortunately did not live through, but in time to suffer the wretched racial laws passed by the Fascist Regime. Reconstructing the biography of the Leghorn painter is an arduous task: there are not many certain biographical elements, and rather arbitrary is the placement of his artistic experience in the group of post-Macchiaioli painters. In the first place, because this term, which was necessary for the enhancement of the Leghorn group at the time, is rather vague, making it unsuitable to accommodate very different artists. Secondly, because Liegi does not belong to that generation, but, if anything, to the previous one, namely somewhere between the Macchiaioli and post-Macchiaioli painters.

There is no doubt that the common denominator of all these experiences and all these protagonists is to have made the Macchiaioli lesson their own, and even in Liegi’s training this had a major weight. In fact, although his first rudiments in art were learned under the aegis of Luigi Corsi and Carlo Markò jr, and then perfected at theAccademia d’Arte in Florence by following the courses of Giuseppe Ciaranfi and Enrico Pollastrini, all artists imbued with Romantic stylistic features, the first proofs in painting that we have of him are rather influenced by the example offered by two of the most important fathers of the Macchia, Telemaco Signorini and Giovanni Fattori. Signorini and Fattori were for him “two prodigal sources of most fertile sap,” as Matteucci wrote, on which the Leghorn painter would drink for no less than fifteen years, and yet even later their legacy would not be squandered.

Among the earliest essays in the exhibition that betray this filiation we find a nucleus of important works, such as the Draga sull’Arno of 1890, where the carpet of grass, brushwood and earth that occupies half of the composition seems to be woven with chromatics inferred directly from Fattori, the colors are still quiet and blended together, while later they will become more vivid, warm and precious. These are works built on a serene and moderately panic contemplation, in which the contrasts are muted, indeed sometimes even muffled, as in the work The Arno Brings Silence to Its Mouth of the Livorno Foundation. The painting shows one of the famous shacks with nets that insist on the mouth of the Tuscan river, a subject to which Liege would often return with ever-changing results. Some of D’Annunzio’s words echo in the work, but contrary to the words of the Vate, the pictorial resolution is not magniloquent but subdued; everything is calibrated, almost stifled, to return an introspective scene pervaded with melancholic calm. The same subject appears in a well-known masterpiece by Francesco Gioli, Bilance a Bocca d’Arno, a painting painted the same year as that of Liege, and certainly of unrepeatable quality, but still belonging to the poetics of late 19th-century naturalism, while that of the Leghorn artist, though not marked by an equal pictorial tightness, shows clear openings toward a painting of a new course, emotional and lyrical.

Also to this early phase belongs the enigmatic painting The Painter’s Studio of 1885, from theMatteucci Institute in Viareggio: the interior’s subject matter is almost a rarity for Liege; moreover, it shows some features of French impressionist painting, which, according to the few known data from the Leghorn artist’s biography, he would encounter only the following year, making a trip to Paris, where he would come into contact with Federico Zandomeneghi and most likely visit the eighth Impressionist exhibition in rue Lafitte. The interior of the artist’s house is delineated with rapid, moving painting, the many furnishings and furniture elements that crowd the space are harmonized by soft brushwork and careful tonal composition, making the atmosphere both brilliant and vibrant, recalling certain interiors by Bonnard but also, as Raffaele Monti noted, much later solutions by Mario Cavaglieri. The result achieved is of such genuine interest that it led critic Stefano Fugazza to wonder why this path was not later followed.

The space painted by Liege tells us not only about a domestic environment that for the Leghorn artist was always a relevant part of his life, but also about that important collecting activity of which he became a promoter, leading him to accumulate works by the Macchiaioli and other colleagues, but also Japanese prints and other oriental elements (as seen in the screen). And perhaps it was thanks to his impressive collection of prints that many Leghorn artists were able to update their painting with novations from the land of the Rising Sun, including Oscar Ghiglia, who is present in the exhibition with a small painting representing a Japanese doll.

Further travel, a sign of a cosmopolitan culture as well as a serene economic tranquility, is crucial to the later outcomes of his painting. He stayed and exhibited several times in London between 1888 and 1889, coming into contact with J.A. McNeill Whistler, while in 1889 he was again in Paris where he participated in the Universal Exhibition with two paintings. During this same period he made friends with Degas, Pissarro, Monet and Sisley, while in Munich with von Lenbach.

These encounters and travels would show the artist the many opportunities opening up for modern painting, which Liege transposed in a painting such as Country of 1895 in which he still adopts a Macchiaioli-like layout, not far from certain solutions of Signorini or Lega, but the à plat backgrounds denote his personal reflection on French art, and perhaps in particular on Gauguin and the Nabis.

From there on, the solutions in Liege’s painting are manifold, and although the lessons learned in Tuscan soil will never be placed in the cellar, they increasingly coexist, to the point of sometimes becoming subordinate, with a continuous effort to surpass realistic perspectives toward a domination of color increasingly free from the cage of drawing, and a search for synthesis of the visual datum, to the advantage of a study of a breezy and brilliant expression. All in an unconventional language that certainly flaunts some tangents with other Leghorn artists, but is characterized by a highly personal interpretation, which is revealed to visitors thanks to the curator’s wise choice to also place in the exhibition a piece each by Giovanni Bartolena, Mario Puccini and Llewelyn Lloyd.

Graphic simplification through the path of color also distinguishes Bartolena, who, however, dares no further in chromatic ignition, while, in the words of Paul Nicholls, if Puccini was a master of forms created with color, Ulvi Liegi was a master of color freed from forms.

By the turn of the century Liegi’s painting was mature and gave some of the most exciting works such as the 1898 Livorno Market in which delightful chromatics are enhanced by a design made of small fragments, like a dazzling mosaic, where, however, the pictorial matter of the tesserae is never homogeneous and flat, but sometimes clumps together or becomes more bloodless. Even more extraordinary is Bocca d’Arno of 1900, whose palette becomes incandescent, bringing the artist closer to the fauve researches, which would take off only a few years later, no concessions are made to the real datum in order to propose a painting that first and foremost is emotional and intellectual vision. In Ponte Vecchio of 1903, Liege confronts the same theme and practically the same perspective as a famous Signorini painting. Yet, the outcomes could not be more different: to the Macchiaioli’s careful and anecdotal description, Liegi through a warmed palette and a rapid, frayed brushstroke achieves a composition where the visual field seems to be involuted in a progressive and slow advance, while the passers-by are resolved with a few marks and in the background the architectures interpenetrate like a complex inlay.

From 1908 Ulvi Liegi returned permanently to his native Livorno, and although economic and family problems befell him, his quest toward the dissolution of drawing in favor of a greater expressive freedom of color did not cease. The artist, from his “intellectual hermitage” as Mario Tinti wrote of it, far from any media clamor, in his cultured and domestic reserve embellishes his palette while he works a drastic synthesis on the drawing system, and not infrequently the support of the painting, the board left uncovered, becomes more and more functional to the success of the painting, allowing the colors to light up, as in the painting Ardenza bagni Pejani - Impression Ardenza of 1930.

At this time his subjects, delineated through a nervous, calligraphic handwriting and an increasingly volatile brushstroke, are the seaside scenes of his city, purged of all worldly narrative to become a contemplative and silent exercise. Added to these are the architectures of Livorno, such as the synagogue and the Baracchina rossa, which, like dazzling tapestries, see a skillful concatenation of chromatic tessellations and graphic signs.

The Livorno exhibition also aims to surpass the constant leitmotif that befalls Ulvi Liegi’s production, that is, that the artist over the years has become content to wearily repeat the usual subjects, losing in strength and effectiveness. For this reason, curator Michele Pierleoni has placed Campagna, painted just two years before his death, at the end of the tour, where the composition liquefies as we watch in a shifting of planes, marking according to Pierleoni a closeness between the Leghorn artist and Chaïm Soutine’s interpretation of landscape.

In conclusion, in the Leghorn exhibition we come across the refined personality of an artist who was able from his refuge in the Tuscan province to intuit and sometimes even presage important outcomes of international modern painting, in a continuous process of exaltation of color, and although this path, according to the writer, was not always sustained by a pictorial tightness free from uncertainties and weaknesses, he has the undoubted merit of standing as one of the most original and interesting Tuscan voices of his time.

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