Lot 254 D

Gottardo Segantini received major impulses from his father Giovanni (for whom he was the only student) and from Ferdinand Hodler, a contemporary of his father. He ardently dedicated himself to the motifs of the alpine world immediately surrounding him: the Segantini family lived in the Italian-Swiss village of Maloja, which is situated between mountain ranges and Lake Sils and is where Gottardo spent most of his life. In his love of nature and his modest personal desires, he led the life of an alpine farmer - a life in the midst of the eternal landscape of this valley standing at the foot of the mountains and bathed in their light and shadows at every time of the day and year. Piz Lagrev was to Gottardo Segantini what Mont Sainte Victoire was in the work of Paul Cézanne. His symbolic interpretation of this terse manifestation of nature is similar in effect and is equally transformed into a remarkable memory through a precise manner of painting featuring a richly colourful palette: a landscape in an autumnal atmosphere beneath the sublimity of the rugged, rocky world of the mountains. We sense his botanical interest in the incomparable flora and the traces of the glacial world of the past, the tonality of the macchia shrubland, the autumn leaves on the larches and Swiss pines and the distinctive light of the higher plateaus in the neighbouring valleys of Maloja. Gottardo Segantini avoids a gentle merging of colours; on the contrary, they are applied alongside one another in dots and precise strokes, painted in a manner similar to that of post-impressionists like Georges Seurat or Paul Signac, but much more subtle - the use of the brush and the boldness of the colours generate a tremendous luminosity. His father Giovanni Segantini had already altered the depiction of mountains from how it was done in the romantic period. For him and his son Gottardo, the unreachable and the majestic - in the form the Romantics Caspar David Friedrich and Joseph Anton Koch had still seen them - were something very close. They do not dramatise the mountain by viewing it from the valley floor, instead, setting out from the plateau lying before it, they discover a different sensation: an intense stillness and solemn reverence before its peak.