The Alps are an altered state. Perhaps one could say as much for all mountains. Taking us far from the plains where most of humanity has lived since the dawn of time, they seem to bring us closer to the sun, where the air is purer and the din of cities feels like a distant rumor. Something of that mood is distilled in the works of the Italian symbolist painter Giovanni Segantini, who was born in 1858 in the town of Arco, at the foothills of the Italian Alps, and who died forty-one years later in Pontresina, amid the mountains in the Italian part of Switzerland.
A small, focused exhibition has just opened at the Getty Center in Los Angeles based on Segantini’s Study for La Vita, a moody pastel mountain scene of 1897, with traces of red chalk and graphite. The finished painting, now in the Segantini Museum in Saint Moritz, was part of a triptych displayed in the Swiss Pavilion at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris. The present exhibition includes nearly a dozen other drawings by the artist (together with mountain scenes from other artists, as well as old photographs of Alpine life, glaciers, chalets, and the like, that are part of the museum’s collection.)
Like La Vita, the two other paintings in the triptych, La Morte and La Natura, are now in the Segantini Museum. All three capture the spirit of the mountains in which the painter chose to live, and they could almost serve as object lessons of the symbolist movement. Indeed, the drawing in the present exhibition has a washed-out, etherealized quality that is one of the benchmarks of that movement. That quality is less evident in the finished work, where a different kind of symbolist mood dominates—an intense realism in the depiction of the mountain scenery, where the lone peasant woman of the drawing becomes a mother and child seated pensively on a rock at the far left. The one cow in the drawing is transformed into an entire flock. What is so winning about the finished painting, like so much of the artist’s late work, is the delicious texture of his surfaces, recalling Wayne Thibault’s almost edible depictions of slices of layer cake and pie. But this painterly distortion paradoxically serves to fortify a sense of realness that almost anticipates Salvador DalÍ.
Exploring the Alps • Getty Center, Los Angeles • to April
27, 2025 • getty.edu
