XII
ARMANDO SPADINI[1]
Armando Spadini is an Italian painter, Italian in fatherland and in style. He was born in Florence in 1883, and has been living in Rome since 1910.
Though he has reached the mid-point of his life and his work, I do not know how his credit is rated on the pictorial exchange, nor in what esteem he is held by those doubly ignorant critics who nourish the emaciated arts of the present day with myrrh or hemlock. There are two tribes of these critic-nurses: the old-school tribe of the Minoses, who have nothing left of the original Minos except his monstrosity; and the new-school tribe of the Ten, who retain but one attribute of the original inquisitors—the mask. I fear that Spadini’s name is not in the good books of either tribe. But that may be a good sign after all.
To form a fair judgment of Spadini, one must know the man, and not merely his painting, which in itself might seem so facile and so commonplace as to deserve only a word and a glance. And the principle that you must know a man in order to understand his work has special force when that work is not the labored product of a brain, but a free expression of nature incarnate in a complete personality.
Armando Spadini, like all who work by inspiration and by instinct rather than by deliberate will, is still a child, despite his five and thirty years; a child spoiled by life, by suffering, by men; a restless child, a melancholy child, but a child with all that is good and all that is ill in the madness and the divinity of childhood. He does not advance by plans and calculations, as do serious men, convinced seekers, self-made men. He moves by leaps, by improvisations, by dashes and flashes. Something suddenly stirs him, draws him, takes possession of him. He is like a child with a new toy, like a moth drawn to the flame. Nothing then can hold him back, and no one can control him. He goes into a sort of furious trance or epileptic seizure, and therein he remains until, conquered or conquering, he returns to the everyday sadness of all those who feel that their achievement is still far short of the ideal.
Spadini is a primitive being, a creature of passion, of impulse and excess, never within the balance of a manhood that has adapted itself to law. Within the course of a few days, of a few hours, he can be jealous and generous, egotistic and loving, grasping and prodigal, chaste and incontinent, ascetic and inebriate, prolific and idle. He may fast for a week, and for the next week eat from morning until night. He may weep in despair for the death of a friend, and share the merriment of a group of companions before the day is out. He may be timid as a whipped dog, and forthwith valiant as a paladin.
His character is not yet formed, nor will it ever attain the cold and reasoned stability of the successful. It is still plastic, like that of children, or of primitive folk, or of women. He is a bundle of passions and of impulses, of manias and of fixed ideas, of superstitions and naïvetés. But his dominant passion is painting: he marvels at the beauty of the visible world, he yearns continually to copy it, to make it over, to transfer its color and its charm to bits of canvas. In his most constant essence he is a man enamored of reality, and served by two eyes and a hand. He hungers for visual reality as a libertine for his prey, as a scholar for books, as a peasant for land.
He paints as he eats: from necessity, and with more or less appetite according to the time of day and the state of his soul. He has none of the traits of the salaried employee of beauty and profundity. He is as greedy as a child, greedy not only for meat and wine, but for color and form. The world is to him an earthly paradise which he desires to clutch, to squeeze, to bite, to possess completely. Women, animals, plants, children: the nearest things, the things in reach, the things he can grasp most easily. His painting is a continual conquest, an almost sensual enjoyment renewed till weariness sets in. He is capable of drawing the same face a hundred times in all its different expressions, in all lights, in all positions, in all companies—never satisfied till he has captured and sucked and swallowed its visual completeness.
It takes but little to amuse and to content him: the shadows of a pergola, the edge of a table, the turn of a path, the corner of a room. But in his domestic scenes there must be living creatures, the same, it may be, from canvas to canvas. The world is so rich, so different from season to season and from hour to hour—and it is so hard to represent one single square of it with the full force of truth—that a humble dwelling and a simple family are enough, and more than enough, for the pictorial endeavor of a lifetime.
Spadini does not turn, for elements of interest or novelty, to history, mythology, or legend, nor—as is now the fashion—to the composition and dissection of unusual objects, to the bones of manikins, to the deformations of still life, to the design of abstract forms. If painting is to be independent of its subject, there is no reason, so it seems to him, why he should not make use of the eternal model, the human figure. And his choice of men and women as subjects is not made in the hope that charm of anecdote or psychological depth may hide artistic poverty. He seeks to convey emotion not by the subjects represented, but by his means of representing them. He is, in short, a painter, and nothing more than a painter: not a historian, not a scientist, not a raconteur, not a metaphysician. Nor can it be maintained that as a subject for pure painting a woman or a child is inferior to a plate of apples or a fantastic hieroglyph. Recourse to such indifferent or unreal subjects for the sake of concentrating attention on the pictorial method is in a sense a catering to the laziness of the spectator. The spectator is all too ready, it is true, to look at the subject and not at the execution; but if he has the least suspicion of the meaning of painting he ought to be able to distinguish purely pictorial value from its decorative or narrative or religious pretext.
In any case, whatever the fashions and theories of the moment, Spadini does not claim to be an innovator, a seeker, a theorist, an exception, a pioneer. He is content to be a true painter, and at the most, an Italian painter. He has no fear of tradition, which for the strong is a springboard, not a prison. He has visited the galleries, but has left them to discover truth again for himself, and to transform it in his own fashion.
Involuntarily, and perhaps unconsciously, he has paralleled the whole development of modern painting. He began in the mode of the Tuscans, the Giottesques: he drew with such scrupulous Florentine exactitude, with such diligence in line, as to seem in certain sketches a mere calligrapher. That was the time of his enthusiasm for the precise drawings of Leonardo and the dainty coloring of Filippino Lippi. That was the time—do you remember, Spadini?—when we used to wander among the cypresses of Vincigliata and the caverns of Monte Ceceri, the time when I was publishing the Leonardo. That was the dawn.
But the asceticism of the quattrocentist drawings gave place to Venetian sensuality. Display after simplicity, woman after the Madonna, color after line, Titian after Giotto. He discovered florid flesh, sumptuous stuffs, gleaming silks, golden shadows, summer skies. He undertook broad decorative compositions, country scenes, sacred or profane, in which an oppressive warmth of luxury and of love casts over all a sense of decadent monotony. The “Finding of the Child Moses,” painted many years ago, serves to illustrate this second period.
Then came a Spanish, or, more precisely, a Goyesque period. Sumptuousness yields again to sobriety, and attention is concentrated on the figure. Two portraits of Pasqualina, the painter’s wife—in one she has a light shawl, in the other she is wearing a blue dress—represent this transition.
But Spadini, who had discovered Goya without visiting Spain, proceeded to discover impressionism without going to Paris. And in impressionism he finally approached the rediscovery of himself. Some of his groups, painted a few years ago, suggest a humbler and less stylistic Renoir. But though Spadini may be rightly called the first and the sanest of the Italian impressionists, he cannot be classed as a mere scholar of the French. Like the French, he forms his art on the old masters—Cézanne copied the Venetians and sought to paint like Titian—but he has his own way of representing the fragments of the world which he discerns from time to time. His very near-sightedness helps him to see things in a personal manner. His ambition is to be the copyist of reality, not the copyist of painters who have recast reality. His painting now is freer, more spontaneous, broader, more essential. He gives no thought to photographic and scholastic exactness, he makes no concessions to the prettiness beloved of the bourgeoisie, he does not search for sentimental effects or for external novelty. A mere ordinary group of living beings in the open air, undisturbed by artificial arrangement, is enough to give him the material for a picture—an ensemble of tones and lights which will convey the immediate impression of truth. That is all he seeks: not sharpness of outline, not scenic grace, not pathos, not hieroglyphic mystery, not mathematical abstraction. He is a clear, sane, simple, homely painter. Look at the two paintings of the Pincian Hill (the little one with the blue sky and the flowers, and the larger one with the carriages) or the two of paths in the Villa Borghese (the lonely one, and the one with people on the benches); look particularly at the portrait of Pasqualina with the broom and the little girl turning her back and her braided hair, a painting of the utmost loving delicacy in color; or look at the other large unfinished household scene that hangs beside it—and you will understand what I mean when I speak of the Italian loyalty of Spadini. Even his color has grown clearer of late. He is successful in his greens, in his violets, and in his dainty shades of rose; he has lost the sickly museum yellow.
He has escaped the infection of all those novelties which have lately been transplanted from France to decay in Italy. In the work of pioneers such novelties have a revealing and a revolutionary value which I should be the first to acknowledge (and here in Italy the names of Soffici and of Carrà will suffice to establish the point). But these French importations have fallen little by little into the hands of a troupe of helpless monkeys who have managed to arouse a general disgust. A rabble of mediocre painters, men and women scarcely competent to draw Vermouth posters or fashion-plates for the Lettura, have found in the recent tendencies of painting a means of camouflaging themselves as futurists—to put it more plainly, a means of painting without knowing how to paint, and of seeming new without being really new, even in their impudence and falsity.
Thus we have in Italy a thin broth of Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, and Boccioni, served up as the last word and the quintessence of pictorial and plastic art. This imported and simulated art has two main divisions. Some of its followers tend to the infantile, to clumsy formlessness, to a barbaric simplification. Others aspire to complexity, to mystery, to inconclusive flourishes, to metaphysical and dynamic geometry. The first group ends in Imbecilism, the other in Hieroglyphicism; but the banner they both bear is that of the great school of False Pretense. We may well admire real children who paint as children, and real savages who carve as savages. We may well admire the hieroglyphics of Egypt and of Persia. We may well respect the pioneers, the courageous creators, who at the cost of seeming to be charlatans seek to discover new heavens and new earths of artistic sensibility. But we may equally well detest the whole mushroom growth of those academicians of the extravagant who attempt to mask the incurable poverty and emptiness of their tiny souls through the repetition of facile semblances. And in the presence of this cheap pretentiousness those who cling to the truth feel the need of drawing close to something more vital. Soffici goes back to the art of the folk; Carrà, through Giotto and Paolo Uccello, resumes the tradition of precise volume and refined color; De Chirico discovers in the architecture of old Italian piazze and in the solid masses of life a field for painting in the grand style of the seventeenth century.
Spadini has had no such experience. He has not felt the need of returning to the true Italian tradition—he had never left it. He has never had the craving for perilous adventure, has never been attracted by the cerebral ingenuity of those theorists whose work has so often turned out to be an object of ephemeral curiosity, undeserving of the name of painting. He has never left reality, nor the Italian method of representing reality. No startling discoveries, but no betrayals and no weaknesses. He has never played the cubist nor the futurist; neither has he let himself be led aside, like so many of his contemporaries, by the preceding fashions, by the imitation (often fruitful, to be sure) of a Stuck or an Anglada. He has never tried the wild excitement of research, but he has never sunk to the elegant banditry of those who paint with an eye to the winning of medals and high prices. He has traveled his own road, conscious of the tremendous difficulty of fixing in color a single fleeting moment of truth; he has felt that the daily endeavor to do this, the daily struggle to achieve the impossible, is enough to bear witness to his courage. He is by no means content with the whole of his own work, and if he were content, his very contentment would mark an end and a condemnation. But if in spite of loneliness, of poverty, and of envy his furious efforts and his loving insistence have enabled him now and then to fix, with the certainty of light and the evidence of color, some incidents and some aspects of living reality, then he has done his duty as a true and honest painter, and we as artists and as Italians owe him gratitude.
- ↑ Written in 1918.