An unintentional Van Gogh: Livorno exhibition dedicated to Mario Puccini

The new exhibition at the Museum of the City of Livorno stems from the rediscovery of an important collection of paintings by Mario Puccini (Livorno, 1869 - Florence, 1920), an important painter who worked in the vein of the Macchiaioli, and defined by Emilio Cecchi in 1913 as an "unintentional Van Gogh," whose artistic historical value is to be celebrated, while at the same time posing a reflection on works that have never before or rarely exhibited in the past. Curated by Nadia Marchioni, joined by a scientific committee consisting of Vincenzo Farinella, Gianni Schiavon and Carlo Sisi, the exhibition celebrates the 2020 centenary of the painter’s death and expands on the research begun at the 2015 exhibition at the Palazzo Mediceo in Seravezza. The exhibition is titled precisely Mario Puccini. Unintentional Van Gogh and runs from July 2 to Sept. 19, 2021.

In fact, the “rediscovered” collection makes it possible to follow the development of Puccini’s artistic career from his debut, starting with the rare portraits of the late 1880s, in which the link with the Florentine artistic milieu of the late 19th century and with the masters Fattori and Lega is evident, to the maturity of the instinctive colorist, as manifested after the five years he spent in the hospitals of Livorno and Siena, where, hospitalized for “primitive dementia,” he was discharged by psychiatrists in 1898 and entrusted, “uncured,” to the custody of his father, allowing him to regain his freedom. Mental illness, in addition to his passionate use of color, helped to suggest already to contemporaries the historical-critical hypothesis of a link between Puccini’s painting and that of Van Gogh, whose work the Leghorn artist had actually admired, along with that of Cézanne, in the famous Florentine collection of Gustavo Sforni, with whom he came into contact thanks to his friend Oscar Ghiglia.

“His updating in a European sense,” says curator Nadia Marchioni, “was probably already under way in 1910, thanks to the direct comparison with the paintings of Van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin observed, among others, at the famous First Florentine Exhibition of Impressionism and stimulated by the examples of Alfredo Müller and Plinio Nomellini, who, like him, grew up in Fattori’s orbit. From this point Puccini’s artistic career flourished thanks to Sforni himself, Mario Galli and other fine collectors who commissioned and purchased his works. The exhibition of Puccini’s work, pandering to chronology, also follows a thematic criterion, with the most representative paintings among all the genres favored by the artist: portraits, still lifes, views of the port of Livorno and, above all, landscapes, in which chromatic lyricism reaches heights of the highest sensitivity.”

With more than one hundred and forty works divided into eight sections, “the exhibition is an opportunity,” the curator continues, “to bring the masterpieces of the aforementioned collection into dialogue with a series of other highly selected paintings from various collections and prestigious museum institutions such as the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome and the Uffizi Galleries, to illustrate the path of theartist in its completeness and through works of the highest formal quality, allowing the public and scholars to confront rare or previously unseen works and adding precious pieces to the knowledge of the enigmatic figure of an artist ’without history’ and of the very lively Tuscan artistic scene between the end of the 19th century and the first twenty years of the 20th century.”

The first section is devoted to Puccini’s beginnings in a late nineteenth-century context where the figures of Fattori and Lega were towering in Tuscany and beyond; the young artist, in Florence to study at the Accademia alongside the illustrious master, made his debut as a portrait painter, on a path that saw him close to his more exuberant friend Nomellini, his fellow citizen. The paintings in this section illuminate the beginnings of Puccini’s art and the context in which his unique early pictorial activity was born, in a series of close comparisons to provide an understanding of the genesis and distinctiveness of the artist’s work, offering some of the rarest evidence of his little-documented period.

The second section documents the forced interruption of the young painter’s artistic pursuit due to the mental crisis that led to his hospitalization, at the age of 24, at the hospital in Livorno and later at the San Niccolò Asylum in Siena, where he was imprisoned from 1894 to 1898; the photos from theperiod, documents and drawings still preserved in the Historical Archives of the Asl 7 of Siena testify to his dramatic existential vicissitude, providing valuable information, thanks to the study of medical records and a rare letter from the artist to the director of the Sienese Institute, on the years of his “confinement.” This documentary section is enriched by the precious and unpublished comparison of three self-portraits of the artist executed between 1912 and 1914, projections of a highly sensitive soul, eager to assert a serene and respectable public image, which conceals within it a bursting and unconventional expressive urgency.

The third section is devoted to the ideal, very deep bond that united Puccini throughout his life with his master Fattori and to the overcoming of his teaching, fostered by the updating in a European sense of painting in Tuscany between the 19th and 20th centuries, when artists such as Nomellini and Müller bumped into the elderly artist’s sensibility, seeking new suggestions between Impressionism, Divisionism and Symbolism. “Puccini,” Marchioni says, “remaining somewhat faithful to Fattori’s teaching and to the firm graphic and compositional structure of his works, was able to renew their message and expressive force by exasperating the formal synthesis and loading the vision with the power of color, sometimes completely abstracted from reality, as in the case of the blue oxen, evidently indebted to the master’s drawing acuities.” Accompanying the section are a series of comparisons between works by Puccini and artists like him who grew up under the Factorian model and were particularly close to the artist through personal and artistic vicissitudes, including Bartolena, Benvenuti, Ghiglia, Ulvi Liegi, and Micheli.

After the silence that reigns in Puccini’s art in the second half of the 1990s, the fourth section shows his return to painting, in a completely changed guise; the artist’s attention is no longer focused on the study of the human figure, but expands to the landscape that surrounds him: through some masterful paintings we follow him in his wanderings in his Livorno, in search of solitary views and silent seascapes, put in relation, in the Museo della Città, with period photographs, emphasizing the artist’s simultaneously realistic and visionary interpretation.

Precisely in the early years of the twentieth century, in fact, the painter’s formal language appears radically changed with respect to the past and informed by the updates that friends, peers and obsequious or “rebellious” pupils with respect to Fattori’s teaching, such as Micheli, Nomellini, and Müller, were introducing into their painting, following the inspiration of a vague “Impressionism,” which already included the Divisionist and Synthetist instances that had matured beyond the Alps at the end of the nineteenth century. The uniqueness of Puccini’s early twentieth-century pictorial testimonies lies in a mature and personal interpretation of the French post-Impressionist climate, condensed in the highly personal figure of a dazzling chromaticism, which illuminates reality with a special light, inconceivable without the constant inspiration of Livorno and a clear influence of Van Gogh’s work.

The fifth section continues the survey of the city’s dynamic cultural scene, presenting two important and extensive paintings by Puccini depicting The Lazzaretto of Livorno, one of which he executed, along with a large charcoal drawing, for the decoration of a room in the Caffé Bardi, a sort of Caffè Michelangelo of the post-Macchiaioli, a hangout for intellectuals and artists since 1909. Puccini and other city painters were commissioned to decorate the Café in Piazza Cavour, of which the major and to date known decorations by Renato Natali, Corrado Michelozzi and Gino Romiti are shown, with a delightful sketch for a lost decoration by Gastone Razzaguta and a drawing by Benvenuto Benvenuti that recalls the’appearance of the café’s hall; a drawing by Puccini executed on the Café’s letterhead, in suggestive comparison with the famous Portrait of Aristide Sommati, made by Modigliani on the café’s letterhead during his stay in Leghorn in 1909, completes the room in which two great Leghorn artists of the early 20th century are thus brought together.

One room of the exhibition is then devoted to the artist’s graphic activity, showing the expressive intensity that the painter was able to achieve even in the sharp and vigorous essentiality of pencil and charcoal strokes; drawings on large formats, depicting city views, harbors, landscapes, animals, peasants, and models confirm Puccini among the great draughtsmen of the twentieth century, in the sign of the master Fattori.

The sixth section shows the artist confronted with different landscapes: the rare works executed in Digne, in the Alpes Maritimes, where Puccini went in 1910 and 1912, characterized by chromatics of unprecedented freshness; those executed in Versilia and Seravezza, where the study of the transport of marbles leads back to the examples of the white Fattorian oxen, which acquire in the younger artist a dazzling blue coloring; and the paintings of the countryside between Livorno and Pisa, the surroundings of Castiglioncello, and the Maremma.

The seventh section analyzes Puccini’s favorite humanity: the everyday world of the people and workers; children sitting idly at the door of humble dwellings, peasants intent on work in the fields. With these works one enters the human universe that the artist most loved, that of the silence and simplicity of industrious labor and childhood, in a celebration, again in the footsteps of the master Fattori, of the anti-heroic dimension of existence.

The eighth section presents a selection of portraits and still lifes, the latter executed in large numbers by Puccini, who from 1911, thanks in part to a company for the marketing of his works set up by his friends Benvenuti and Pierotti della Sanguigna, began to achieve some success in sales. The artist, in constant need of confrontation with the real, likely devoted himself to these pictorial genres on bad weather days, far from natural light, but the emotional power of his painting appears almost enhanced by the intimate and dense theme of still life, tackled with an unparalleled chromatic intensity, as is the case in one of his most extraordinary portraits, that of engineer and collector Emanuele Rosselli.

A special section of the exhibition evokes, as an antecedent to Puccini’s mature work, Van Gogh’ s The Gardener now at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome, the Dutch artist’s first work exhibited in Italy, in Florence, at the First Italian Exhibition of Impressionism in 1910, after being purchased in Paris by Gustavo Sforni, in whose Florentine collection Puccini was able to admire it during a documented visit. “This image,” the curator concludes, "represents the most significant commentary on the words of the many critics who have evoked the name of the Dutch artist in regard to Puccini’s work, called an ’involuntary van Gogh’ by Emilio Cecchi, while Mario Tinti expressed the well-known equation: ’Puccini stands to Fattori, as Van Gogh stands to Cézanne...,’ a parallel that Llewelyn Lloyd warned against in his volume Times Gone By, claiming the city pride of a ’Livornese van Gogh.’"

For all information you can call +39 0586 824551 or email museodellacitta@comune.livorno.it.

Pictured: Mario Puccini, Guardianella with pigs.

An unintentional Van Gogh: Livorno exhibition dedicated to Mario Puccini

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