Vittorio Pica, Art Critic and Amateur d’estampes

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

VITTORIO PICA, ART CRITIC AND AMATEUR D’ESTAMPES

DAVIDE LACAGNINA

The name Vittorio Pica (1862-1930) is not new to American readers. In 1910 James Gibbons Huneker (1860-1921), a music composer and critic for the Music Courier and New York Sun who was educated in Europe as a musician and then based in New York, published a novel, Promenades of an Impressionist, a selection of profiles dedicated to a variety of old masters and modern artists—from El Greco and Velázquez to Cézanne and Manet, from Botticelli, Piranesi and Watteau to the strictly understood impressionists Monet, Renoir and Degas—grouped together with fin-de-siècle taste. It’s no surprise then to find the second chapter of Huneker’s book dedicated to “Rops, the etcher,” “a man of genius, one of the greatest etchers and lithographers of his century, an artist with an intense personal line, a colossal workman and versatile inventor.” At the end of his analysis, the author gives detailed reference to “the triumphant chorus of Rops’s admirers” that “comprises—the authors continues—the most critical names in France and Italy.”1

Among the prestigious names of Joris-Karl Huysmans, Emile Verhaeren, Stéphane Mallarmé, Octave Mirbeau and Charles Baudelaire, the only Italian mentioned by Huneker is Vittorio Pica. This shows not only Pica’s interest in Symbolist graphics but also the international reputation the Italian critic could count on in his epoch. A reputation which does however find difficulty in being unanimously accepted nowadays. As a matter of fact, although Pica’s merits have been already recognized as translator, critic and supporter of French symbolist Literature—and it is again in the United States that Pica was acknowledged as the “first champion of French symbolism in Italy”2— his monumental production of art criticism is still not well known and little investigated, especially if we consider the wide spectrum of interests cultivated by the Italian author. Pica was among the first in Europe to open to the Scandinavian countries, for example, and was certainly the first in Italy to show an interest in

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Japanese art or primitive sculpture and to the most diverse ambits of creative intervention such as art editing, industrial and decorative arts, graphics, architecture, performing arts and photography.

Born in Naples of an English mother and an Italian politician who was exiled in the United Kingdom and soon after the Unification of Italy named senator of the Reign, young Vittorio devoted himself to literary and art criticism, writing for many different magazines in Italy, Germany, France, England, Spain and even Portugal, since his university years at the Faculty of Law in Naples.3 At the end of the nineteenth century he collaborated in founding the Italian art magazine Emporium, which was modeled on the English The Studio. In the last three decades of his life, his commitment to art became exclusive. He was appointed vice-secretary of the Venice Biennale for two editions (1912-1914) and after the war, full-secretary for four editions (1920-1926). After his refusal to accept in Venice the artists of the “Novecento Italiano” Group, lead by the art critic Margherita Sarfatti, Pica was forced to resign from the secretariat of the Biennale in 1927. He was replaced by Antonio Maraini, artist and critic welcomed by Mussolini. A fact that is not only evidence of Italian fascist cultural policy, but also a clear disclaiming of Pica’s reputation, that may explain, at least in part, his lack of critical consideration so far. After Pica’s death, Maraini refused to acquire the author’s personal library and papers for the Biennale Archives. Consequently it is extremely difficult today to reconstruct the extraordinary net of contacts kept by Pica during his life, developed through leading figures of the artistic and literary Symbolist milieu around the world, from Fernand Khnopff to Maurice Denis, from Maurice Barres to Emile Verhaeren, from Felix Fénéon to André Fontainas, from the Portuguese Eugenio de Castro to the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío. Just such a brief list of names confirms Pica in the role of a privileged spectator of his time, undoubtedly a protagonist, both social and intellectual, of that cultural context.4

However, as well as many other critics interested in Symbolism and only recently returned to art criticism historiography through a new generation of scholars,5 Pica’s fortune also suffered from that modernist orientation of art criticism that never wanted to make rebates to its own “mythography of modern art,” according to which any genealogy was to be included in that particular evolutionary line—Impressionism-Cézanne-Cubism—that has long prevailed over all other critical approach to modern art historiography. The result was that Pica has been ignored both by the scholarship interested in vanguards, or at least in the modernist vision of them, which considered him too old-fashioned and backward-looking (denying, as a consequence, the important inheritance of Symbolism in

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vanguard movements), and by reactionary criticism as well. In this last case, too, colleagues looked on him suspiciously as at a “xenophile” intellectual, little motivated to promote Italian art within the country and abroad and too attracted by foreign “macabre” artists (as Italian critics referred sometimes to Symbolist artists) or by those artisti d’eccezione, as Pica used to call Les Nabis, post-impressionists, japonistes, secessionists, idealists and “decorative artists” he so liked.

Of course, the lack of interest in Pica’s writings was directly proportional to the scarce fortune these artists had in Italy until a few years ago. After Roberto Longhi—perhaps one of the most influent of art historians in Italy of the twentieth century—judged Pica as “a writer mentally confused by decadent fumes,” you couldn’t gain a serious reputation as a scholar, if you decided to study fin-de-siècle art,6 and not just for the devaluation of Pica itself, but for the anathema cast against the decadent movement. Although we may agree with Longhi, in front of Pica’s embarrassing misunderstanding of fauve painting and other most “extreme” presences on display at the Salon d’Automne of Paris in 1905, we can hardly fail to recognize how coherent, in taste and critical discourse, were the choices proposed in Pica’s book and so firmly reproached by Longhi: the synthétiste line, the à plat brushwork, the informal and pulsing abstraction of late Monet, the intellectualism of the most properly Symbolist research by Gauguin, Denis, Roussel, Vuillard and Bonnard. Longhi would have rather assured his sympathies to Seurat, Signac, and Cézanne, since they were officially regarded as the most immediate and accredited precedents of Cubism, that is to say the vanguard movement par excellence (according at least to that genealogic direct line recalled above).

As examples of Pica’s interests in European Symbolist drawings and graphics, we can focus on a couple of articles published in Emporium in the special section Attraverso gli Albi e le Cartelle (Sensazioni d’arte) [Through the albums and the folders (Art sensations)].7 Pica presented the artists he most appreciated by publishing their works in illustrated art volumes he himself conceived, projected, and then took care for, as editor, to the very last detail—a formula that was always extremely refined from an editorial and graphic design point of view, in the layout of the pages, the frontispieces and the illustrations, in order to make the books more appealing to the editorial market, improve distribution and educate the general public’s taste in art. Graphic design was considered the most modern artistic form available through wide-scale circulation of magazines, posters, public advertisements and illustrated printed books. A more conscious critical approach to Pica’s editorial work should be carried


out by investigating connections, divergences and “short-circuits” between words and images, both as an occasion for narrative accounts (description) and theoretical concerns (interpretation) for the images and as an opportunity to build a visual-literary discourse conducted simultaneously on multiple levels of media communication.8

The very first article Pica published in 1896 in the section Attraverso gli Albi e le Cartelle was dedicated to Redon, Rops, De Groux and Goya. The introduction immediately creates the “sensations” evocated in the title of the section and also clarifies the Italian critic’s approach to the work of art, in some sort of religious isolation and concentration (windows and doors closed, soft lights, silence), in which the interpretation was to be strictly personal. The author describes a condition of “pathological cerebral apathy,” a “bothersome state of mind,” against which the sole solution seems “to exile oneself from the real world and to travel into the hyperbolic fantastic worlds, taking as guides the genial masters of the pencil and burin.” It’s no surprise then to find that the first examples refer to the album of lithographs dedicated to Edgar Allan Poe by Odilon Redon (1840-1916), “the vigorous drawer who, in a series of abstruse and suggestive lithographs, succeeded in framing the most terrific hallucinations of a brain exalted by typhus and opium.”9 Although in such an approach the limit of Nordau’s and Lombroso’s theories on degeneration as creative condition of modern art (or at least of that specific “degenerated” declination otherwise classified as “decadent”), is quite evident, Pica starts describing the six compositions in the album, soon giving up any previous key of analysis. He quotes Jules Destrée’s catalogue of Redon’s lithographic work,10 but he prefers his own free interpretation and translates images in a very personal way. He asks himself:

Has the drawer meant to give form to the anguished nothingness of the facts of our earth, so gloomy and vacuous, to men’s constant and yet vain aspiration to explain the supreme problem of all philosophies, by looking at the infinite, and the atrophy, the degeneration, the agony of the thought in such hopeless research? Maybe! But why wanting to find an explication at any cost? Isn’t it the character typical of the most really and highly suggestive works of art to offer the most diverse interpretations, and isn’t it in this that their most fascinating aspect lies?11

Pica had the chance to see works by Odilon Redon in 1895 at the first edition of the Venice Biennale, where the French artist presented two paintings.12 Pica felt Redon particularly close to his sensibility and considered its production in line with those principles of artistic and literary poetics of decadent address that in the overspill of the respective


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linguistic registers was fed by a continuous exchange between word and image, between the capacity of the text to collect and amplify the suggestions arising from the experience of the vision and the power of the artistic form, in its turn, to condense in the space of the artwork the endless imaginative drifts of literature. In spite of the tradition of European Naturalism of Pica’s former education—he himself was in contact with Emile Zola—he soon after matured a special interest in Symbolist poetics between the 1880s and the 1890s. In those years he discovered Huysmans and the codification of an aesthetics in which art, literature and life could be—or rather, should, by historical necessity and programmatic declaration—live on the same poetic and existential horizon.

After the failure of the poetics of Naturalism, the generation of intellectuals to which Pica belonged found itself forced to come to terms with the causes of such failure. Through the exploration of the recesses of the unconscious, and then trying to give meaning to the painful experiences of reality, each boundary between subject and object was deleted and a confrontation with the world became the symbolic instrument of an existential condition of languor and longing for new forms of expression. The sequence of the images that illustrate the article clearly shows Pica’s attitude towards the printed paper and the poetics that inspired his selection of artists. The choice to publish some of Redon’s illustrations for Baudelaire’s Fleures du mal soon after those dedicated to Poe further clarify the meaning of the intellectual correspondences constantly researched between text and image.13

The work of Odilon Redon, with its complicated symbolism, while trying to express both the deep poverty of human clay and the avid inspiration of the spirit towards the Ideal, uses unexpected but always logical deformations of the truth and amazing creations of monsters, which touch on the grotesque and often risk seeming childish, it appears, as a whole, far from any tradition and any common vision of art. It won’t seem so strange then if I flatly affirm not only that it cannot be tasted at first, but also that it is not even intended to collect the suffrage of a rather small array of these refined spirits, who find a singular pleasure in being employees of the artist, to discover and supplement his thin, sibylline and quite unusual conceptions.14


Fig. 25-1. Odilon Redon, Pégase captif.


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The first picture published just next to the frontispiece, on the left, was the lithograph of the Pégase captif (Fig. 25-1), a work that Pica himself conserved in his art collection (and not by chance then put in such a prominent position). We find it also reproduced in the auction catalogue with which Pica’s widow, Anna Marazzani, sold part of his collection after his death. It is not an isolated case. According to the catalogue, Pica’s collection of graphics could count at least on two other pieces by Redon: Serpent-Auréole (Fig. 25-2), a lithograph produced in 50 exemplars, and Lumière (Fig. 25-3), another lithograph in 50 exemplars signed with the artist’s initials. Both works were published in the article of 1896.15 By following such criteria, it is easy to discover that many of the works published by Pica in his articles, especially in the ones dedicated to graphics in Emporium, under the section Attraverso gli Albi e le Cartelle, were his own property, in many cases gifts received by the artists themselves or acquired through the most prestigious art merchants of the epoch specializing in the field (as the Maison Sagot-Legarrec in Paris), bought at international exhibitions or interchanged with other collectors and amateurs (with the other Italian art critic Ugo Ojetti, for instance).16

Going further into the article of 1896, the paragraphs dedicated to Félicien Rops (1833-1898) clearly specify the literary sources of Pica’s cultural intentions. Once all the necessary distinctions had been made, he tries to establish a parallelism between Redon and Rops, stressing their vocation as poets-painters, as

they belong to the interesting family of those artists, who, operating an artistic transfer, try to evocate literary emotions by drawing or, vice versa, as Gautier and the Goncourt brothers did, to awake pictorial impressions through the written word. The old academics judge that this overspill between the arts is a sign of decadence, and that may be, but what an extraordinary emotional intensity is reached by such decadents!17

If Poe was the most proper reference for Redon, Baudelaire and Barbey d’Aurevilly are now the right ones for Rops. The artist had worked for both authors. He illustrated Les épaves by Baudelaire (the Belgian edition of the sonnets censored in the first French version of Les fleurs du mal) and Les diaboliques by Barbey d’Aurevilly (Fig. 25-4),

with his skilful burin he has done something very similar, in its deepest inspiration, to what the two masters did with their pens, synthesizing with rare mastery their satanic spirit in some etchings that are for sure among their best ones.18


Fig. 25-2. Odilon Redon, Serpent-auréole.


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In order to stress such a textual-visual equivalence, Pica focuses his attention on some frontispieces from his own collection ideated by Rops— Le vice suprême (Fig. 25-5), Curieuse and L’initiation sentimentale—for the homonymous novels by Joséphin Péladan. Their detailed descriptions are full of literary references and erudite quotations as well as statements taken from the private communications of the same painter. Pica must had been in contact with Rops, but what is noteworthy is that again the Italian critic’s interests as a collector determine his choices and in this case far before the public acknowledgment of the Belgian artist in Italy. As a matter of fact, we have to wait until 1907 to see Rops invited to the Venice Biennale (and again in 1909) and, it easy to imagine, thanks only to Pica’s intervention.19 Again his passion for collecting is evident. In the article he claims to possess more than fifty works by Rops; he regrets missing the purchase of the two albums with Cent légers croquis pour réjouir les honnêtes gentes (1877-1880) for sale at the Hôtel Drouot, and he also spends some words on that minor production of stationery—visiting or invitation cards, ex-libris, headed notepaper and posters—as well as on the less known graphic works dedicated to rural subjects. The frontispieces of Péladan’s books above mentioned belonged to Pica, and this is why we find them exposed at the Biennale—Le vice suprême, for instance in 1909—as well as being in his private collection. This is the case of L’oncle Claes et la tante Johanna quoted and reproduced in his article of 1896 and yet present in the Toscanini auction catalogue of 1931.20

Among the many other examples we can choose from—Bernard, De Groux, Ensor, Khnopff, Munch, Toorop, Valloton—quite a remarkable case study is offered by Pica’s interest in August Rodin’s graphic production. Pica was one of the first few critics of the epoch, and certainly the only Italian, who paid special attention to the artist’s drawings as well as to his plastic works. He aimed to establish a relation between the two forms in order to better interpret Rodin’s works in marble, bronze or plaster which were—also in this case—not immediately readable by the general public and, as we know, misunderstood and rejected even by most art professionals from a strictly academic background. The occasion was given by one of the last articles published in the section Attraverso gli Albi e le Cartelle and dedicated to the drawings of three sculptors: the Italian Vincenzo Gemito (1852-1929), the Belgian Constantin Meunier (1831-1905), and the French Auguste Rodin (1840-1917).

Looking at the drawings by Auguste Rodin, more than the ones by Carpeaux and Barye, it is evident that they are and cannot but be carried out by a sculptor.


Fig. 25-3. Odilon Redon, Lumière.

It follows that their value is mainly documentary and evocative. Documentary, because they help us penetrate deeper in the inner psychological expansion of the creative genius of their author. Suggestive, because their remarkable merit is to let us see, behind I do not know what mysterious veil, what of new, of sharp and profound lies in the grace of the


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rhythmic dynamics of their arabesques, which, while expressing, with harsh synthesis, the fundamental line of a human, divine or bestial figure, fixes its immediacy of movement and expression.21

The dynamic line of Rodin’s drawings, like the plastic movement of his sculptures, is all read and interpreted in a psychological-existential sense. According to Pica, the value of the French artist lies in his capacity to give the truth of an expression, the very immediate perception of reality through the shaping of the pulsing, living, matter, personally experienced and “felt” both physically—in the act of modeling or operating plaster, bronze or marble—and intellectually, by giving form to human soul-states. The practice of drawing itself and the exemplars published, especially the pen-drawings (Fig. 25-7), were meant then as documents of such inexorable creative vital impulse. The intimate correspondence between drawing and sculpture—“the graphic work by Rodin, certainly less varied, but no less abundant, was held synchronously with his sculptural work”—is clearly affirmed by Pica more than once in the article.22

The documents that remain of Pica’s private collection register twelve drawings signed by the artist himself, a dry-point, the Printemps, that we see published in the reissue of the same article in the fourth volume of the second edition of the collection Attraverso gli Albi e le Cartelle and also on the cover page of the Toscanini auction catalogue (Fig. 25-6), and an etching with the portrait of Antonin Proust, with a personal dedication by the artist.23 As seen before with Redon, it is possible that the drawings Pica used for the layout of his article of 1916 (four of which were “unpublished” according to the caption [Fig. 25-8-10]), were the same ones listed in the catalogue of the first auction sale held at the Casa d’Artisti in Milan. Pica probably visited the exhibition of Rodin’s drawings on display between October and November 1908 at the Maison Devambez, an important printer’s firm established in 1826 in Passage des Panoramas in Paris. The catalogue was prefaced by Louis Vauxcelles, an art critic unfairly known more for his scorn for French vanguards rather than for his merits as a sensitive interpreter of symbolist art.24 The presence of two etchings, Le circle and Victor Hugo, at the Venice Biennale the following year must be put in strict relation with the Parisian exhibition at Devambez’s.25

The facts analyzed so far show Pica’s modus operandi. He used to gather first-hand information directly from the artists he was in contact with. He discussed and agreed with them over the selection of the works and asked them for images of high quality resolution to be published in his articles. Moreover, crossing the dates of Pica’s articles and the acquisitions made by Italian museums, we can hardly fail to notice the extraordinary


Fig. 25-4. Félicien Rops, illustrations for Le bonheur dans le crime (left below) and the book Les diaboliques (right above) by Jules-Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly.


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Fig. 25-5. Félicien Rops, illustration for the novel Le vice suprême by Joséphin Péladan.


timeliness of Pica’s suggestions, as if he were acting more as an art dealer than as an art critic, sponsoring or assuming the responsibility of the purchases. Beside his interests as a collector, we should not forget that Pica was also responsible for the sales department of the Venice Biennale in 1912 and in 1914.26

On the other hand, Pica’s constant effort to promote the purchase of modern art through the major public collections in Italy (Venice, Rome, but also the famous Artists’ Self-portraits Gallery of the Uffizi, in Florence, by encouraging donations from the artists themselves) finds a concrete counterpart in the broad information given on international artists, little or not known in Italy, through widely distributed press. If a personal economical interest cannot be excluded in promoting the artists he himself collected, the tone of his articles and the many pictures of himself leafing through his beloved albums and folders of graphic works in his studios of Naples and Milan27 document unequivocally his unconditioned passion in spite of any commercial implication. Actually, it is only after his death that his young widow, Anna Marazzani, decided to sell her husband’s art collections along with his personal library privately, through the Casa d’Artisti and the Toscanini auction house of Milan. It was sad proof that Pica wasn’t a wealthy man in life or at least not enough for his fortune survive him, if his wife was compelled to act as she did, especially after the resolute refusal of the Biennale to buy his library or to assign a life annuity to the widow.28

Despite the blindness of Maraini, the openings that Pica so boldly marked seem indisputable at a closer look, especially when we consider the renewal of taste for art criticism and for the practice of art itself within that Symbolist milieu so important to better comprehend the birth of vanguards in Italy. It is only thanks to Pica that a new generation of Italian artists was able to reach an international visual heritage as never before. More punctual comparative textual analysis, between the artists reproduced by Pica in his articles and contemporary artistic research in Italy, could give really impressive results in documenting which were the visual sources many artists adopted for their own works. Anticipating the results of research still in course, I can only say that you would be surprised to discover the important role played by the graphic works of authors like Munch or the more unexpected Spanish Hermén Anglada in the pre-futurist debut of Boccioni, both as a visual artist and an art critic.29

Considering all this, Vittorio Pica’s merits are countless. Think for example of the exhibition of African sculpture he organized at the Venice Biennale in 1922 in order to educate the Italian public about cubist and futurist primitivism.30 That’s why he can’t really be dismissed, as he has


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been until now (sometimes too hurriedly), because of an ideological and meta-historical misunderstanding of vanguard values—these values being abstract, too—intended as a parameter of distinction between good art and bad art and, as a consequence, between good art criticism and bad art criticism. The general audience of collectors and art lovers, but also the so-called art professionals, is so evidently in debt with Pica to make seem suspicious that conspiracy of silence which has undervalued his incidence so far. As a matter of fact, Pica didn’t waive dogmas or precepts meant to be good for any occasion. He didn’t want to systemize his thoughts within a rigid theoretical set, but just to express more “modest” personal opinions, meditated and proposed to his “beloved readers”—as he often referred to his faithful admirers—with all honesty and limits of his intellectual vanity.

Fig. 25-6. Auguste Rodin, Printemps.


Fig. 25-7. Auguste Rodin, studies.


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Fig. 25-8. Auguste Rodin, studies for female nudes in different poses.


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List of Illustrations

Fig. 25-1. Odilon Redon, Pégase captif. Lithograph published in Vittorio Pica, “Attraverso gli albi e le cartelle (sensazioni d'arte). I. Redon - Rops - De Groux - Goya”, Emporium III (1896): 122. Fig. 25-2. Odilon Redon, Serpent-auréole. Lithograph published in Vittorio Pica, “Attraverso gli albi e le cartelle (sensazioni d'arte). I. Redon - Rops - De Groux - Goya”, Emporium III (1896): 126. Fig. 25-3. Odilon Redon, Lumière. Lithograph (published in Vittorio Pica, “Attraverso gli albi e le cartelle (sensazioni d'arte). I. Redon - Rops - De Groux - Goya”, Emporium III (1896): 125. Fig. 25-4. Félicien Rops, illustrations for the tale Le bonheur dans le crime (left below) and the book Les diaboliques (right above) by Jules-Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly. Etchings published in Vittorio Pica, “Attraverso gli albi e le cartelle (sensazioni d'arte). I. Redon - Rops - De Groux - Goya”, Emporium III (1896): 130. Fig. 25-5. Félicien Rops, illustration for the novel Le vice suprême by Joséphin Péladan. Etching published in Vittorio Pica, “Attraverso gli albi e le cartelle (sensazioni d'arte). I. Redon - Rops - De Groux - Goya”, Emporium III (1896): 128. Fig. 25-6. Auguste Rodin, Printemps. Dry-point published on the cover page of Catalogue de la Collection Vittorio Pica. Eaux-fortes, Pointes Sèches, Vernis Mous, Lithographies des Grands Maîtres du XIXème Siècle (Milano, Antiquariato W. Toscanini, 9 december 1931). Fig. 25-7. Auguste Rodin, studies. Pen-drawings published in Vittorio Pica, “I disegni di tre scultori moderni. Gemito - Meunier - Rodin”, Emporium XLIII (1916): 402. Fig. 25-8. Auguste Rodin, studies for female nudes in different poses. Pen-drawings published in Vittorio Pica, “I disegni di tre scultori moderni. Gemito - Meunier - Rodin”, Emporium XLIII (1916): 419. Fig. 25-9. Auguste Rodin, studies for female nudes in different poses. Pen-drawings published in Vittorio Pica, “I disegni di tre scultori moderni.


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Gemito - Meunier - Rodin”, Emporium XLIII (1916): 420. Fig. 25-10. Auguste Rodin, studies for female nudes in different poses. Pen-drawings published in Vittorio Pica, “I disegni di tre scultori moderni. Gemito - Meunier - Rodin”, Emporium XLIII (1916): 421.

Notes

1 James Jibbons Hunecker, Promenades of an Impressionist (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1910), 33 2 Olga Ragusa, “Vittorio Pica: First Champion of French Symbolism in Italy,” Italica 35 (1958): 255-61. On Pica, critic and translator of French symbolist literature, see also Luciano Erba, presentation to Vittorio Pica, Letteratura d’eccezione, ed. Ernesto Citro (Genova: Costa & Nolan, 1987): 5-10 and the most recent Shirley W. Vinall, “French Symbolism and Italian Poetry: 1880-1920,” in Patrick McGuinness, ed., Symbolism, Decadence and the Fin the Siècle: French and European Perspectives (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000): 244-263; Nicola D’Antuono, Vittorio Pica: Un visionario tra Napoli e l’Europa (Roma: Carocci, 2002); Vittorio Pica, “Votre fidèle ami de Naples,” Lettere a Edmond de Goncourt (1881-1896), ed. Nunzio Ruggiero (Napoli: Guida, 2004) and Alessandro Gaudio, La sinistra estrema dell’arte: Vittorio Pica alle origini dell’estetismo in Italia (Rome: Vecchiarelli Editore, 2006). On Pica’s personality as art critic see Anna Cambedda, “L’informazione sull’arte straniera” in Italia nella critica di Vittorio Pica, ed. Gianna Piantoni, Roma 1911 (Roma: De Luca editori d’arte, 1980): 89-96 and Davide Lacagnina, “Votre œuvre si originale et si puissante. Vittorio Pica scrive a Joaquín Sorolla,” Materia, 5 (2005): 69-89; Lacagnina, “Avanguardia, identità nazionale e tradizione del moderno: Ignacio Zuloaga e la critica italiana (a partire da due articoli di Vittorio Pica),” in Giorgio Bacci, Massimo Ferretti and Miriam Fileti Mazza, ed., Emporium. Parole e figure tra il 1895 e il 1964 (Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2009), 403-33; Lacagnina, “Le penombre di un giardino spagnolo. Vittorio Pica i la fortuna de Santiago Rusiñol a Itàlia,” in Vinyet Panyella, ed., Santiago Rusiñol, del Modernisme al Noucentisme (Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans-Societat Catalana de Llengua i Literatura, 2010): in press. 3 Pica’s bibliography, still incomplete, can be rebuilt (to the extent of what is known) by crossing the titles recollected under the voice “Vittorio Pica” by Sergio Samek Lodovici, Storici, teorici e critici delle arti figurative d’Italia dal 1800 al 1940 (Rome: Tosi, 1946): 284-7, and those published in Mariantonietta Picone Petrusa, ed., Il manifesto. Arte e comunicazione nelle origini della pubblicità (Naples: Liguori, 1994): 145-59 (with a complete register of all articles Pica published in Emporium), in Nicola D’Antuono, Vittorio Pica: 175-200 and, for any title until 1898, by Alessandro Gaudio, La sinistra estrema dell’arte: 141-160. 4 On Maraini’s refusal see Giuliana Donzello, Arte e collezionismo. Fradeletto e Pica segretari alle Biennali veneziane 1895-1926 (Firenze: Firenze Libri, 1987),


57-61. The disputes related to the participation of the “Novecento Italiano” Group in the Venice Biennale exhibitions in the ‘20s are reported in Leonardo Dudreville’s manuscript published by Rossana Bossaglia, Il “Novecento italiano”. Storia, documenti, iconografia (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1979), 65-77. 5 See for instance the most recent Françoise Lucbert, Entre le voir et le dire. La critique d'art des écrivains dans la presse symboliste en France de 1882 à 1906 (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2005), Catherine Méneux, ed., Regards de critiques d'art. Autour de Roger Marx (1859-1913) (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes [Paris]: Institut national d'histoire de l'art, 2009) and the forthcoming proceedings of the international colloquium Gustave Kahn (1859-1936). Ecrivain symboliste et critique d'art (Paris, Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme, 22-23 November 2006). 6 Roberto Longhi, “L’Impressionismo e il gusto degli italiani,” preface to John Rewald, Storia dell’Impressionismo (Firenze: Sansoni, 1949), xx, now also in Roberto Longhi, Scritti sull’Otto e Novecento: 1925-1956 (Firenze: Sansoni, 1984), 15. The Italian art historian referred to Vittorio Pica, Gl’impressionisti francesi (Bergamo: Istituto Italiano d’Arti Grafiche, 1908), that, in spite of all limits Longhi pointed out, had the merit of popularizing the subject for the first time in Italy with extraordinary visual documentation, at least one illustration per page, and even before the otherwise well-known exhibits of impressionist painting of Florence (Prima Mostra Italiana dell'Impressionismo, 1910) and Venice (XII Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte della Città di Venezia, 1920). On the reception of Impressionism in Italy see Maria Mimita Lamberti, “Vittorio Pica e l’Impressionismo in Italia,” Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. Classe di Lettere e Filosofia, 5 (1975): 1149-1201; Flavio Fergonzi, “Firenze 1910-Venezia 1920: Emilio Cecchi, i quadri francesi e le difficoltà dell’impressionismo,” Bollettino d’arte 79 (1993): 1-26; Jean-François Rodriguez, La réception de l’Impressionnisme à Florence en 1910 (Venezia: Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere e Arti, 1994) and the most recent Francesca Bardazzi, ed., Cézanne a Firenze. Due collezionisti e la mostra dell’Impressionismo del 1910 (Milano: Electa, 2007). For the reception of Symbolism in Italy, we have to wait until Barilli’s studies in the late 1960s—Renato Barilli, ed., Soggettività e oggettività del linguaggio simbolista (Milano: Fabbri, 1967)—and Damigella’s contribution in the early 1980s—Anna Maria Damigella, La pittura simbolista in Italia 1885-1900 (Torino: Einaudi, 1981)—to attest to a more mature critical appraisal. 7 All articles by Pica appearing in this section were recollected in four different volumes with the same title and published in two prestigious editions: Vittorio Pica, Attraverso gli Albi e le Cartelle (Sensazioni d’arte) (Bergamo: Istituto Italiano d’Arti Grafiche, 1901-1904, 1st edition, and 1904-1921, 2nd edition). 8 It would be unfair to forget the names of the artists that helped Pica to build his monumental editorial work, by mentioning at least the names of Alfredo Baruffi, Benvenuto Disertori and especially Alberto Martini, whose signatures often occur in the covers, in the frames, in the initials of his books and even in the decoration of his private papers (letters, invitations, visiting cards). On the relation Pica-


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Martini see Marco Lorandi, ed., Un'affettuosa stretta di mano. L'epistolario di Vittorio Pica ad Alberto Martini (Monza: Viennepierre Edizioni, 1994). As evidence of Pica’s pre-eminent interest in graphics, even his last most important publication, before his death, was dedicated to the subject: Vittorio Pica and Aniceto del Massa, Atlas de la gravure moderne (Firenze: Rinascimento del libro, 1928). 9 Vittorio Pica, “Attraverso gli albi e le cartelle (sensazioni d’arte). I. Redon - Rops - De Groux - Goya,” Emporium III (1896): 123. All translations into English are mine.

L’unico rimedio contro questo fastidioso stato dello spirito, contro questa patologica apatia celebrale è di esiliarsi dal mondo reale e di viaggiare negli iperbolici mondi fantastici, prendendo per guida i geniali maestri della matita e del bulino. . . . Odilon Redon, il vigoroso disegnatore che in una serie di astruse e suggestive litografie, ha saputo fermare le più terrifiche allucinazioni di un cervello esaltato dal tifo e dall’oppio.

10 Jules Destrée, L’œuvre lithographique de Odilon Redon (Bruxelles: Deman, 1891). 11 Pica, “Redon - Rops - De Groux – Goya,” 123-4.

Ha inteso il disegnatore indicare il nulla angoscioso delle cose sulla nostra terra, così tristemente tetra e vacua, l’aspirazione perenne e pur tanto vana dell’uomo ad esplicare il supremo problema delle filosofie ed a guardare nell’infinito, e l’atrofia, la degenerazione, l’agonia del pensiero in tale ricerca senza speme? Forse! Perché volere ad ogni costo una precisa esplicazione? Non è proprio il carattere delle opere veramente ed altamente suggestive, di prestarsi alle più svariate intepretazioni, e non istà proprio in ciò il loro fascino maggiore?

12 Actually Pica had already dedicated an article to Redon the year before. Vittorio Pica, “Odilon Redon,” La Riforma, October 8, 1894. 13 Pica, “Redon - Rops - De Groux – Goya,” 124. 14 Ibid., 126-7.

L’opera di Odilon Redon, col suo complicato simbolismo, che ad esprimere nell’istesso tempo la profonda miseria della creta umana e l’avida ispirazione dello spirito verso l’Ideale, ricorre ad impensate ma sempre logiche deformazioni del vero e ad incredibili creazioni di mostri, sfiorando a volte il grottesco e minacciando sovente di cadere nel puerile, appare, nel suo complesso, lontana da ogni tradizione e da ogni abituale visione d’arte. Non sembrerà quindi strano che io recisamente affermi, che essa non soltanto non può venire gustata di primo acchito, ma è addirittura destinata a non raccogliere che il suffragio di un’assai minuscola schiera di quegli spiriti raffinati, i quali trovano un singolare diletto a farsi i collaboratori dell’artista, a scovrirne ed a completarne le concezioni sottili, sibilline ed affatto fuori dal commune.

15 Catalogue de la Collection Vittorio Pica. Eaux-fortes, Pointes Sèches, Vernis Mous, Lithographies des Grands Maîtres du XIXème Siècle, Auction Catalogue (Milano, Antiquariato W. Toscanini, december 9, 1931): items 542-4 and


illustration XV. Another exemplar of the lithograph Lumière of 1893 is to be identified with that one entitled Luce on display at the Venice Biennale in 1920 in the French Section (XII Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte della città di Venezia. Catalogo [Venezia: C. Ferrari, 1920]: 126, item 83) and bought for its collection of graphics by The International Modern Art Gallery of Ca’ Pesaro, Venice (Flavia Scotton, ed., Venezia. Ca’ Pesaro. Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna. I disegni e le stampe. Catalogo generale [Venezia: Musei Civici Veneziani, 2002]: 106, item 2596). 16 See for instance the letters exchanged with the Maison Sagot-Legarrec (Paris, Bibliothèque Jacques Doucet, archives 86, box 96: Italie/Pica, Vittorio [Naples]) or the ones addressed to Ugo Ojetti (Rome, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Archivio storico, Fondo Ugo Ojetti, cassetta 58/5, I-II). Both funds, as far as Pica is concerned, are being edited in the widest context of a study I’m conducting on him. 17 Pica, “Redon - Rops - De Groux - Goya,” 127.

Appartengono all’interessante famiglia di quegli artisti che, operando una trasposizione d’arte, sforzansi di suscitare emozioni letterarie attraverso il disegno o, viceversa, così come hanno fatto Gautier ed i fratelli Goncourt, di risvegliare impressioni pittoriche con la parola scritta. I parrucconi sentenziano severamente che questo sconfinare di un’arte in un’altra attesti decadenza, e sia pure, ma quale straordinaria intensità emozionale raggiungono codesti decadenti!

18 Ibid., 127-8. Col suo sapiente bulino ha fatto opera assai somigliante, come intima ispirazione, a quella fatta dai due maestri della penna, dei quali egli ha, con rara maestria, sintetizzato lo spirito satanico in alcune stupende acqueforti che sono certo tra le sue migliori.

19 Pica’s official involvement within the structure of the Biennale dates back only to 1912. Nevertheless, it is certain that Pica is constantly monitoring the event in the chronicles for Emporium and other national newspapers that he began immediately to recollect in volumes of large distribution and commercial success, first for the publisher Pierro of Naples and then (1899-1907) for the Istituto Italiano di Arti Grafiche of Bergamo: Vittorio Pica, L’Arte Europea a Venezia (Napoli: Pierro, 1896); L’Arte Mondiale a Venezia (Bergamo: Istituto Italiano di Arti Grafiche, 1897); L’Arte Mondiale alla III Esposizione di Venezia (Bergamo: Istituto Italiano di Arti Grafiche, 1899); L’Arte Mondiale alla IV Esposizione di Venezia (Bergamo: Istituto Italiano di Arti Grafiche, 1901); L’Arte Mondiale alla V Esposizione di Venezia (Bergamo: Istituto Italiano di Arti Grafiche, 1903); L’Arte Mondiale a Venezia nel 1905 (Bergamo: Istituto Italiano di Arti Grafiche, 1905); L’Arte Mondiale alla VII Esposizione di Venezia (Bergamo: Istituto Italiano di Arti Grafiche, 1907). However, in some of the choices made by the artistic direction of the Biennale, the imprint of Pica, or, if nothing else, its indirect influence, can be recognized in the display of a special section of Japanese art for the second edition in 1897, or in attention paid to graphics, especially from northern Europe, with the two exhibitions of Dutch etchings, in 1895 and in 1897,


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curated by Philip Zilcken. In 1907 the committee appointed by the Municipality of Venice for the purchases at the Biennale suggested buying some etchings by Rops: “Relazioni delle commissioni per gli acquisti al Sindaco di Venezia, 1907,” in Catalogo della Galleria internazionale d’arte moderna della città di Venezia (Venezia: Istituto Veneto di Arti Grafiche, 1913): 18-20. Members of the committee were Davide Calandra, Pietro Fragiacomo, Gaetano Moretti, Ettore Tito and Giovanni Tesorone. 20 Pica, “Redon - Rops - De Groux - Goya,” 129 and 131 (illustration right below) and Catalogue de la Collection Vittorio Pica, item 549. 21 Pica, “I disegni di tre scultori moderni. Gemito - Meunier – Rodin,” Emporium XLIII (1916), 419.

Dai disegni, invece, di Auguste Rodin, come e più ancora che da quelli di Carpeaux e del Barye, evidente appare che essi sono e che non possono essere che di uno scultore. // Ne consegue che il loro valore è sopra tutto documentario e suggestivo. Documentario, perché giovano a farci penetrare assai oltre nell’intima elaborazione psicologica del genio creativo del loro autore. Suggestivo, perché il singolare pregio ne risiede non meno in quanto lasciano scorgere, dietro non so dire quale velo misterioso, di nuovo di sottile e di profondo che nella grazia ritmica e dinamica dei loro arabeschi, i quali, mentre esprimono, con efficace sintesi, la linea fondamentale di una figura divina umana o belluina che sia, ne fissano la istantaneità del movimento e dell’espressione.

22 Pica, “Gemito - Meunier – Rodin,” 421. “Ebbene l’opera grafica del Rodin, certo meno varia ma non meno abbondante, si è svolta sincrona all’opera sua scultorea.” On the parallelism between Rodin and Bergson’s theory of the élan vital see Luca Quattrocchi, “Rodin e Bergson: tra materia e memoria,” This Century’s Review 1 (2006), http://www.thiscenturyreview.com/article.html?&no_cache=1&tx_ttnews[t t_news]=33&tx_ttnews[backPid]=17&cHash=4a3f1af97e. 23 The twelve drawings are documented in Collezione Vittorio Pica, Auction Catalogue (Milano, Casa d’Artisti, 4-16 marzo 1931), items 39-50; the dry-point and the etching in Catalogue de la Collection Vittorio Pica, items 546-7. The text of the article by Pica, “Gemito - Meunier - Rodin” was republished under the same title in Pica, Attraverso gli Albi e le Cartelle (Bergamo: Istituto Italiano d’Arti Grafiche, 1904-1921): 4:129-66. 24 Exposition de dessins d'Auguste Rodin (Paris: Chez Devambez, October 19 –November 5, 1908), preface by Louis Vauxcelles. See, on him, Lorenzo Giusti, “Louis Vauxcelles e la genesi del fauvismo,” Ricerche di storia dell'arte 81 (2003): 5-22. 25 VIII Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte della Città di Venezia. Catalogo illustrato (Venezia: Ferrari, 1909): 150, items 97-98. 26 See, for instance, Italy’s purchasing of Rodin’s works. Pica was a member of the committee appointed by the Municipality of Venice that proposed the purchase of Les bourgeois de Calais in 1901: see “Relazioni delle commissioni per gli acquisti al Sindaco di Venezia, 1901,” in Catalogo della Galleria internazionale d’arte moderna della città di Venezia, 11-4. Many of Pica’s suggestions to Antonio


Fradeletto, secretary of the first Venice Biennales, about the artists to invite and the works to buy, are documented by Paola Zatti, “Le prime Biennali veneziane (1895-1912): il contributo di Vittorio Pica,” Venezia Arti 7 (1993): 111-6. On Le penseur, bought in 1907 by Count Grimani and donated to Ca’ Pesaro, see Alessandro Stella, Cronistoria della Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte della Città di Venezia 1895-1912 (Venezia: Fabris, s.d.), 88. L’homme qui marche, exposed at the International Art Exhibition of Rome in 1911, where Pica was the curator of the foreign sections, was bought by a group of amateurs and then donated to the French government that assigned it to its own diplomatic seat in Rome at Palazzo Farnese. The statue was removed from the palace courtyard in 1923 and transferred to the Musée des Beaux-Arts of Lyon and then (1986) to the Musée d’Orsay (RF 4094). See Antoinette Le Normand-Romain, “L’Età del Bronzo, 1877,” in Ibid., ed., Rodin e l’Italia (Rome: De Luca, 2001). 48. It is still in Rome that the exemplar n. 22 of the fortunate series of L’âge d’airain was bought for the collection of the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome. About Rodin’s reception in Italy see also Flavio Fergonzi, “Auguste Rodin e gli scultori italiani (1889-1915). 1,” Prospettiva 89-90 (1998): 40-73 and Fergonzi, “Auguste Rodin e gli scultori italiani (1889-1915). 2,” Prospettiva 95-96 (1999): 24-50. 27 See the photo-portraits of Pica published in the obituary signed by Raffaele Calzini, “In memoriam: Vittorio Pica,” Emporium 71 (1930): 259-66. 28 Soon after Pica’s death, his widow addressed some letters to the Ojetti asking for help in this sense (Rome, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Archivio storico, Fondo Ugo Ojetti, cassetta 58/5, II). 29 The importance of Anglada as a possible visual source for Boccioni’s work before his adhesion to Futurism was first proposed by Maria Mimita Lamberti, “Vittorio Pica e l’Impressionismo in Italia,” 1181. Regarding the influences derived from Munch, see the latest considerations by Ilaria Schiaffini, Umberto Boccioni. Stati d’animo. Teoria e pittura (Cinisello Balsamo: Silvana Editoriale, 2002): 128 and 151, note 52. 30 Carlo Anti and Aldobrandino Mochi, “Mostra di scultura negra,” in XIII Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte della Città di Venezia. Catalogo (Milano: Bestetti & Tumminelli, 1922): 41-44.

Vittorio Pica, Art Critic and Amateur d’estampes

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