Giovanni Segantini -

Ever higher, ever more famous

Giovanni Segantini played an important role in reviving Alpine painting and as a representative of Symbolism at the end of the 19th century. Parallels are often drawn between the different phases in his life – Arco in South Tyrol, Milan, the Brianza region to the north of Milan, Savognin in Oberhalbstein, Maloja in the Engadine and finally the Schafberg mountain high above Pontresina – and the sharp rise in his career as an artist, aptly coined in the phrase: «Ever higher – ever more famous».

Giovanni Segantini’s youth

Segantini was born on January 15, 1858 in what was then the Austrian city of Arco, the son of street vendor Agostino Segantini and Margherita de Girardi. His mother died early. When he was seven, Giovanni was sent to live with his half-sister, Irene, in Milan, where he spent a difficult childhood and youth. He trained to be a shoemaker, worked in his half-brother Napoleone’s photography and chemist’s shop and was assistant to a decorative painter. He attended courses at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan and achieved his first success with his painting, “Il coro di Sant’Antonio” (The Choir of the Church of Sant’Antonio).

Brianza

In 1881, Segantini turned his back on the city, moving to Brianza, the lake district between Milan and Como, with Luigia Bugatti, known as Bice. His rejection of the city and the Academy, with its doctrinaire rules and prescribed mythological and religious subject matter, is typical of the times. Like many artists, Segantini looked beyond traditional forms of painting in search of naturalistic, simple motifs from everyday life. At that time, Brianza was a rural landscape, and Segantini immediately set to work studying the daily lives of the peasants. The close relationship between the shepherds or shepherdesses and their animals was a favorite pictorial motif, which the artist also repeatedly took up in Graubünden. In 1882, the unmarried couple’s first son, Gottardo, (who was later to became a painter himself and also wrote his father’s biography) was born, followed in later years by sons Alberto and Mario and daughter Bianca.

Segantini Familie: von links Alberto, Giovanni, Bice, Mario, Baba Uffer, Gottardo, Bianca

Graubünden

In August 1886, after a long exploratory trip, Giovanni Segantini settled in Savognin, an Alpine farming village in the Oberhalbstein region of Graubünden. Shortly afterwards, in the winter of 1886/87, his art dealer, Vittore Grubicy, visited telling his protégé about the latest developments in the art world in France. However, it was the Alpine landscape, with its crystal-clear light, which led Segantini to discover a new pictorial language. He sometimes gave the closely observed mountain landscapes symbolic content, creating allegorical visions of extraordinary luminosity. This shift away from realistic genre painting came at a time when it was in crisis all across Europe.

After eight years in Savognin, Giovanni Segantini moved with his family to the Engadine, perhaps to escape his creditors. In 1894, he took up residence in the Chalet Kuoni in Maloja. Here, the artist – whose paintings were among the most expensive of the day – continued to enjoy the extravagant lifestyle of the Milanese upper classes, which rapidly swallowed up his increasingly high fees. The family spent the winters in Soglio, in the Bregaglia valley.

On September 28, 1899, at age 41, Segantini unexpectedly died of peritonitis on the Schafberg, high above Pontresina, while working on the middle section of his Alpine Triptych.

Albert Steiner Hütte