After seventy years, Autumn Sun, Segantini's recently acquired masterpiece, returns to public display in Arco

The Giovanni Segantini Civic Gallery in Arco presents from Nov. 15, 2024, to Jan. 26, 2025, in a new arrangement designed for the exhibition Sun of Autumn. The rediscovered masterpiece, curated by Niccolò D’Agati, Segantini’s recently acquired masterpiece Sun of Autumn. The new installation aims to enhance its centrality in the path of the Arcense painter’s pictorial research, and the fundamental role of passage in the evolution of Segantini’s experimentation between the Brianza years and the opening of the most intense phase of his activity after his move to Graubünden, when a renewed sense of color and light imposed itself as the founding nucleus of a new aesthetic conception.

Autumn Sun is a painting of exceptional importance, and from the prestigious collecting history acquired at the Bottegantica Gallery in Milan. After seventy years, since 1954, the year of the Pittori Lombardi del Secondo Ottocento exhibition held at the Villa Comunale dell’Olmo in Como, the work is once again on public view. In the Italian context, the musealization of Autumn Sun by the Municipality of Arco for a sum of 3 million euros constitutes one of the largest public purchases ever of a work of the Italian 19th century and in particular the largest Segantini acquisition since 1927.

On the occasion of the one hundred and twenty-fifth anniversary of Segantini’s death, the Giovanni Segantini Civic Gallery in Arco is dedicating a focus to the city of Arco’s ongoing bond with the painter, beginning with the commission of the monument to Leonardo Bistolfi. A masterpiece that fosters not only studies on Giovanni Segantini, but on all 19th-century Italian painting.

Because of its iconographic, technical and pictorial characteristics, the painting constitutes one of the cornerstones of Segantini’s painting and one of his most important works known today from 1887. To be read in continuity with the results achieved with the work Alla Stanga (1885-1886), kept at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome, the work is elaborated by the painter at the time when, under the influence of Vittore Grubicy, he experimented in Ave Maria a Trasbordo (1886), kept at the Segantini Museum in St. Moritz, with an early instinctual application of Divisionist drafting. The use of pure-color impasto is freer, the brushstroke articulates the surface in complex ways, becoming more full-bodied or more elongated; the subtle chromatic variations, freed from the crepuscular conventionality of the Brianza years, restore the color and light studied from life.

Autumn Sun, a prime icon of Segantini naturalism, is linked to two other masterpieces of the artist’s production, such as Allo sciogliersi delle nevi (1888) in the Segantini Museum in St. Moritz and Vacche aggiogate (1888) in the Kunstmuseum Basel.

In terms of theme, the painting also constitutes a real break with the works of the early 1880s. In fact, the canvas overcomes the literary impasse of the tragic and elegiac idyll to celebrate a more direct exaltation of nature in its essential values, freeing it from a sentimental reinterpretation and bringing it, instead, closer to a panic and universal conception.

Passed from the collection of Alberto Grubicy (1887) to that of the Dall’Acqua family (1894), the work later entered the Rossello collection (pre-1926), among the most substantial and important collections of the entire Italian twentieth century.

Info: The exhibition will be open to the public until Jan. 26, 2025; from Jan. 28 to March 31, 2025, the tour will be available by reservation for schools and organized groups, with guided tours, also in German and English.

Image: Giovanni Segantini, Autumn Sun (1887; oil on canvas, 90 x 192 cm)

After seventy years, Autumn Sun, Segantini's recently acquired masterpiece, returns to public display in Arco

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