PAINTINGS OF THE '900
 

Glimpse of a snowy town

Oil on hardboard. Signed lower right. Born in 1905, Gaetano Valbusa worked for over forty years as a worker in the Brescia Mechanical Workshops, until retirement, devoting himself to painting only as a passion. Landscape painter, thanks to business trips he was able to portray "en plein air" glimpses of the whole world, even if the glimpses of the places in Brescia are the most recurring subject. Affiliated to the Brescian Artists Association, he was able to exhibit his works and make himself known by critics. In his canvases the landscapes are permeated with great serenity and tranquility, an elegy of serene memories of real life. The glimpse proposed here is presented in a frame.

The Country Road

Oil on hardboard. Signed lower left. Having moved as a child with his family to Milan in 1898, still very young, Raoul Viviani enrolled at the Brera Academy, where he studied under the guidance of Giuseppe Mentessi (1857-1931). At the same time he attended the nude school of the Artistic Family, with which he exhibited for the first time at the age of 17, immediately enjoying great success with the public and critics, as a landscape painter with a strong personality and modernity and for his highly original style characterized from strong chromatic experiments. In 1912 he participated in the Venice Biennale and subsequently participated in numerous national and international exhibitions. From 1926 he began his career in the field of art criticism, writing for various newspapers, but his opposition to fascism led him to choose voluntary exile: in 1931 he moved to Uruguay, where he founded and directed the Academy of Montevideo Fine Arts. Returning to Milan in 1937, he resumed his activity as a painter and as a critic. In the 1950s he moved to Rapallo for health reasons and remained there until his death. Extremely original landscape painter, who engages in oil painting but also in watercolor and engraving, is very close to pointillist painting, however, developing his own personal technique, characterized by very thin filaments of color in the form of thin commas, which define the structures of the its landscapes. With his transfer to Liguria, the Ligurian landscape becomes the protagonist of his works and also his mute technique, moving away from the original pointillism to open up to a broad and summary brushstroke, which finally leads to a production of still lifes from violent and contrasting colors. In this work in which the technical characteristic of Viviani is well appreciated, along the country path that runs along the canal, a figure of a woman appears, which constitutes an exception in his production, usually lacking in figurative elements. Work in frame.