This last section gathers art from the formative and then definitive period of a true Italian modernism. The works’ relatively separate development, remarkably disparate appearance, and correspondence to either unusually sustained individual efforts or short-lived movements all distinguish the period in Italy from elsewhere in Europe. On the left side of the room pictured here are examples by precursors of two kinds: those exploring novel compositions and experimental techniques, notably Giuseppe De Nittis and Giovanni Boldini, who worked principally in Paris where they sought out the avant-garde, and the leaders of a group known as the Macchiaioli—like the impressionists, committed to capturing optical sensation and emphasizing the paint surface—Telemaco Signorini and Giovanni Fattori, who worked in the now minor center of Florence and cultivated an analytical, completely unsentimental naturalism. The rear wall and case are devoted to futurism, which violently rejected tradition and scorned Italian art of the late nineteenth century as equally conventional. Instead, during the intense decade of the 1910s, the futurist group proclaimed a radical style to express the dynamism, the truly new reality, of modern industry and technology. The right side of the room above offers examples by artists who worked independently of the main currents of early twentieth-century art and instead sought to reconcile established styles, from classicism to naturalism, with those of the new century.
A Different Modernism

Precursors

Giuseppe De Nittis
Barletta (Bari), 1846–Saint-Gérmain-en-Laye (France), 1884
The Dancer Holoke-GO-Zen, 1873
etching, drypoint, and roulette
Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund, 2010.7.1

Giuseppe De Nittis
Barletta (Bari), 1846–Saint-Germain-en-Laye (France), 1884
Elegant Young Woman Seen from Behind, c. 1875
etching and drypoint, proof
Purchased as the Gift of Matthew and Ann Nimetz, 2013.115.1
This is a rare, vaporous proof of the artist’s favorite subject as a printmaker. The image was created almost entirely by applying thin films of ink dabbed and wiped across its surface. By contrast, the impression of a similar subject to the right was printed conventionally, with ink held in the etched lines and transmitted without special surface effects. De Nittis’s experimental approach to etching resembles that of his friends Edgar Degas and Camille Pissarro. Trained in Naples and briefly associated with the Macchiaioli in Florence, De Nittis, along with Boldini, was one of the most important Italian artists to make Paris his home.

Giuseppe De Nittis
Barletta (Bari), 1846–Saint-Germain-en-Laye (France), 1884
View Taken in London (Vue prise à Londres), c. 1876
etching in sepia, proof before letters
The Ahmanson Foundation, 2013.31.8

Telemaco Signorini
Florence, 1835–1901
House of Dante da Castiglione (Casa di Dante da Castiglione), c. 1883
etching
The Ahmanson Foundation, 2013.28.6
This intimate, deeply shadowed view of the house of the late fifteenth-century theologian and biographer Francesco Dante da Castiglione evokes a distinguished past. Signorini returned to the subject later in his major work as an etcher—eleven views of Florence’s old market area that was demolished starting in 1883. A print from that series, Santa Maria della Tromba, appears in the following slide.

Telemaco Signorini
Florence, 1835–1901
Santa Maria della Tromba, 1886
etching
The Ahmanson Foundation, 2013.28.7
This print is the most unconventional and celebrated of Signorini’s eleven views of the area of Florence’s old market, which had just been demolished to make way for the construction of the Piazza della Repubblica. A much-venerated fourteenth-century tabernacle (street shrine) is located on the corner at the left of the composition, just behind the woman hauling a basket on her head. While the stacked and bulging middle ground conveys the previously teeming life of the area, the abstract shapes formed by the uninterrupted edges and patches of sky anticipate modernist city views of a half-century later, by artists like Charles Sheeler.

Giovanni Fattori
Livorno, 1825–Florence, 1908
Oxen Yoked to the Cart (Maremma) (Bovi al carro [Maremma]), 1886/1887
etching, proof before reduction of the plate
The Ahmanson Foundation, 2013.28.3
This print exemplifies the qualities for which Fattori is regarded as the most original etcher in late nineteenth-century Italy. Depicting traditional agrarian life along the coast of his native Tuscany, it demonstrates a stark, unsentimental realism. Developed through pure line and clean wiping of the plate—inspired by eighteenth-century Venetians like Tiepolo and Canaletto, rather than by contemporary French artists—the print offers an extraordinary range of marks, textures, and movement of light. Later, in prints like Bauco near Rome, later in this slideshow, this artistic language would approach the abstract. Fattori created some two hundred etchings, but printed few impressions of any of them.

Giovanni Fattori
Livorno, 1825–Florence, 1908
Woman of the Gabbro (Donna del gabbro), 1886/1887
etching
The Ahmanson Foundation, 2013.28.4

Giovanni Boldini
Ferrara, 1842–Paris, 1931
Whistler Asleep, 1897
drypoint
Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund, 2014.27.1

Giovanni Fattori
Livorno, 1825–Florence, 1908
Bauco near Rome (Bauco presso Roma), c. 1904
Etching, proof
Pepita Milmore Memorial Fund, 2013.30.15
Futurism

Umberto Boccioni
Reggio Calabria, 1882–Verona, 1916
Woman Reading (Donna che legge), 1910
etching, proof in dark brown
Pepita Milmore Memorial Fund, 2013.30.2
All of Boccioni’s thirty etchings were created in a brief, three-year period of transition from an early, more realistic style to one dedicated to capturing the dynamism of modern life. The small scale and rapid execution underscore his intimate relationships to the subject, who has been identified as his sister. The ingredients of his mature futurist style are evident in the diagonal armature of the composition, the simplified planes of the modeling, and the energetic hatching.

Luigi Russolo
Portogruaro (Venice), 1885–Cerro di Laveno (Varese), 1947
Morning (Mattino), 1910
etching and aquatint
Purchased as the Gift of Matthew and Ann Nimetz, 2014.64.2
A railroad track dominates the landscape, and the sun’s radiance is blocked by smoke trailing a train’s engine. Russolo signed the futurist manifesto of 1910 and shared their enthusiasm for the progressive forces of industrialization, although with ambivalent feelings about its effect on the landscape. In handling, this print lies between the delicate pointillism of Russolo’s early landscapes and the striking electricity of his compositions of the early 1910s. Trained as a musician, Russolo dedicated himself exclusively to music after 1913, pioneering non-notational music based upon non-traditional instrumentation and random sounds and noises.

Gino Severini
Cortona, 1883–Paris, 1966
Study for ‘Ballerina’, 1913/14
pastel and graphite on tan paper
Promised Gift
This drawing is closely related to one of the most important paintings of Severini’s brief futurist period. The dancing shapes, vibrant surface, and luminous color accord with the movement’s aesthetic, while the fractured subject (the ballerina of the title), barely recognizable by a head represented by a red cone at top and a triangular left arm raised, reflects Severini’s experience of cubism in Paris, where he had moved in 1906. Severini’s brushwork, broken into countless dots of pigment, distinguished him from other futurists and allied him with the divisionists, with whom he had trained in Milan.

Carlo Carrà
Quarguento (Alessandria), 1881–Milan, 1966
Graphic Rhythm with Airplane (Homage to Blériot), 1914
pen and ink with graphite and collage on graph paper
Patrons’ Permanent Fund, 2004.62.1
This page from a notebook is an outstanding example of how the futurist language could generate complex meaning. The upper half is a tribute to the French aviator Louis Blériot’s first flight across the English Channel in 1909, with words referring to that accomplishment composed into the shape of his monoplane. In the lower half, phrases and letters refer to an illicit affair. The diagonal of their arrangement rhymes with the shape of the monoplane, while the horizontal lines suggest murmured sounds and the pattern of waves beneath the flight. Thus connected and inflected, flight and sexual activity—their risk, daring, and physical movement—become mutual metaphors. The most restless of the futurists, Carrà would shortly abandon the group to develop a more concrete, classicizing style that he and Giorgio de Chirico called metaphysical painting. Carrà's Head of a Boy (also included in this slideshow) demonstrates this simplified yet monumental style.

Angelo Rognoni
Pavia, 1896–1957
Barrage in the Carso (Preparazione d’artiglieria nel Carso), 1917
black and colored inks with graphite
Eugene L. and Marie-Louise Garbaty Fund and the Mr. and Mrs. Louis Glickfield Fund, 2008.26.1
During the spring and summer of 1917, the Italian army advanced on Austro-Hungarian forces occupying the Carso Plateau on the northeastern Italian border with modern Slovenia. Rognoni noted at the upper left corner that this drawing represents a massive barrage of artillery fire preceding an assault. True to the futurist credo, the image combines pure form—the arcing lines of trajectories and trenches—with invented words imitating sounds—the “ta pum ta pum” (at center left) of cannons, the “ta ta ta ta” (at middle right) of machine guns—in a kind of free verse (“lirica parolibera”) with ironic interjections (“The soldier in the trench doesn’t give a damn” and “SAVOOOIA,” a play on the family name of the Italian monarchy).

Carlo Carrà
Quarguento (Alessandria), 1881–Milan, 1966
Head of a Boy (Testa di ragazzo), 1922
etching, proof before additional work
Pepita Milmore Memorial Fund, 2013.30.3

Giacomo Balla
Turin, 1871–Rome, 1958
Full Speed Ahead (AVANTI AVANTI A TUTTO VAPORE), 1924
Pen and ink, colored pencil and graphite on a telegraph form
William B. O’Neal Fund, 2012.55.1
Futurism in Print
While futurism rejected the artistic etching of the previous generation, printed materials involving words were fundamental to its activity. A number of the futurists’ most important works, expounding on their ideas and intentions, are displayed in this slideshow. Its leader, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, declared the movement in a series of manifestos. Assembled in Parole in libertà (Words-in-Freedom), they describe a radical language that defies convention and syntax. In Guerrapittura, Carrà argues that war is an "incentive to creativity… nothing but art pursued by other means.” Covers for futurist publications, like Boccioni and Ballà’s designs for completely atonal and free harmonic scores by Nino Formoso and Francesco Balilla Pratella, were a regular concern and frequent project. Most significant, the futurists combined word, sign, and image in a new form of representation intended to capture the full sensory experience of modern life, as in Marinetti’s Zang Tumb Tuuum, which evokes the action and sounds of a battle in the Balkans, and Cangiullo’s whimsical Caffeconcerto, which imagines a cabaret performance by letters of the alphabet.

Umberto Boccioni
Milan, 1882–1916
Cover for Francesco Balilla Pratella, Musica futurista per orchestra, 1912
two-color lithograph
William B. O’Neal Fund, 2014.87.1

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
Alexandria (Egypt), 1876–Bellagio (Como), 1944
Zang Tumb Tuuum: Adrianopoli Ottobre 1912: Parole in Libertà, 1914
bound volume with lineblock and typographic illustrations
William B. O’Neal Fund, 2009.63.3

Carlo Carrà
Quarguento (Alessandria), 1881–Milan, 1966
Guerrapittura, 1915
bound volume with lineblock and typographic illustrations
William B. O’Neal Fund, 2009.63.2

Giacomo Balla
Turin, 1871–Rome, 1958
Cover for Nino Formoso, Ti Ta Tò, 1918
two-color lithograph
William B. O’Neal Fund, 2009.63.1


Francesco Cangiullo
Naples, 1888–Livorno, 1977
Caffeconcerto: Alfabeto a sorpresa, 1919
bound volume with 29 pages of lineblock and typographic illustrations on colored paper
William B. O’Neal Fund, 2009.50.1

Francesco Cangiullo
Naples, 1888–Livorno, 1977
Cafè-Chantant, 1915
pen and ink
Richard S. Zeisler Fund and Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund, 2009.84.2

Francesco Cangiullo
Naples, 1888–Livorno, 1977
Oplà (Troupe Muscolini), 1915
pen and ink
Richard S. Zeisler Fund and Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund, 2009.84.6
Individualists

Cino Bozzetti
Lecce, 1876–Borgoratto (Alessandria), 1949
Woods on the Bank of a River (Il Bosco in riva al fiume), 1911
etching
The Ahmanson Foundation, 2013.31.12
Bozzetti’s etchings carried the Piedmontese tradition of landscape etching into a distinctive modern idiom. His style involved elements from three approaches: Italian divisionism (a movement similar to French pointillism), led by Vittore Grubicy, whose etching appears in the previous room; post-impressionism—one contemporary critic called him “the Italian Van Gogh” because of the rich, tortuous handling of his paint and etching needle; and, most unusual, seventeenth-century Dutch landscape etching. This print’s planar composition, the curious shape of its trees, and the dense marks represent an homage to one of the first masters of that school, Willem Buytewech.

Anselmo Bucci
Fossombrone (Pesaro), 1887–Monza (Milan), 1955
Place Blanche à Montmartre, 1915
drypoint
Purchased as the Gift of Matthew and Ann Nimetz, 2013.115.5

Alberto Martini
Oderzo (Treviso), 1876–Milan, 1954
Kiss (Bacio), 1915
lithograph
Pepita Milmore Memorial Fund, 2013.30.5
Kiss was created at the peak of Martini’s activity as a printmaker. Unusual in the panorama of Italian modern art, its visual double entendre—the two approaching faces implied as one—and symbolic meaning—opposites attracting and generating heat as light—as well as fine control of lithography relate it to French print projects of the 1890s. Reckoning with how to represent not the appearance but the drives and energy of desire, this print also suggests familiarity with Freud’s recent theory of the unconscious. Most of Martini’s work is illustration, at first in a minutely realistic style influenced by northern Renaissance printmakers, then by the 1920s featuring macabre imagery that marks him as a precursor of surrealism.

Adolfo De Carolis
Montefiore dell’Aso (Ascoli Piceno), 1874–Rome, 1928
The Archer (L’Arciere), 1917
chiaroscuro woodcut from two blocks, printed in red-brown and ocher
Pepita Milmore Memorial Fund, 2013.30.4
De Carolis was the preeminent woodcut artist and illustrator in Italy at the beginning of the twentieth century. The Archer is an unusual example of a print created independent of any text. The heavy outlining and the dense, swirling patterning of the background place this print squarely in the early twentieth century, even while the twisting, muscular figures and the technique of multiple-block color printing—so-called chiaroscuro woodcut—are characteristic of mid-sixteenth-century Italian mannerism.

Luigi Bartolini
Cupramontana (Ancona), 1892–Rome, 1963
Cemetery of Prisoners of War (Cimitero dei prigionieri di guerra), 1920
etching, proof on Japanese paper
Pepita Milmore Memorial Fund, 2013.30.7

Giorgio Morandi
Bologna, 1890–1964
Still Life with a Basket of Bread, 1921
etching on chine collé
Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund, 1972.72.1
Morandi was the great individualist of twentieth-century Italian art and a singular figure in modern printmaking. He collaborated early with the futurists and flirted with the so-called metaphysical painting of Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà, which reaffirmed representation and symbolic forms, but took his direction from Paul Cézanne and inspiration from old masters who had been concerned with pure form, like Piero della Francesca and Jean-Siméon Chardin. This small still life is one of Morandi’s earliest prints, from the year of exhibitions of his work in Berlin and Hanover that established his international reputation. Unwavering in focus and discipline, he would explore this type of distilled, meditative realism in still lifes for the next forty years.