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拍品专文
The Jewish community of the Tuscan seaport of Livorno produced two notable artists whose lives spanned the 19th and 20th centuries: Vittorio Corcos and Amadeo Modigliani. Corcos enjoyed a long and prosperous career, dying at the age of 74 in 1933. Modigliani struggled to sell his work and died little-known at the age of 35 in 1920.
Modigliani is now of the most famous of the 20th century artists and Corcos, at least outside Italy, is best remembered for his rather conventional society and royal portraits, although the artist also produced some breathtakingly beautiful and intimate images. An Afternoon on the Porch is one of these remarkable works. More and more attention is being paid to the artist, due in part to the 2014 at the Palazzo Zabarella in Padua, ‘Corcos: Dreams of the Belle Epoque’. The show included more than 100 works by the artist, 27 of which were shown publicly for the first time. Eighteen works in the show had not been exhibited for more than half a century.
Vittorio Corcos was a naturally gifted artist and at the age of sixteen was admitted directly into the second year at Florence’s Academia di Belle Arti. Two years later, with monies raised by the people of his hometown, the young artist moved on to Naples, where he studied with Domenico Morelli. In 1880, the purchase of one of Corcos’ pictures by King Umberto I provided him the necessary funds to make the essential journey to Paris.
Upon arriving in Paris, Corcos immediately introduced himself to Giuseppe de Nittis, who along with Giovanni Boldini, was the most successful Italian artist to relocate in Paris. At de Nittis’ salon, the young Corcos was introduced to Degas, Manet, Caillebotte, Daudet, Edmond de Goncourt along with many other leading artistic figures of fin-de-siècle Paris. De Nittis was also instrumental in introducing Corcos to the Maison Goupil. Corcos signed a contract with the French dealers which relieved him of all financial concerns, and he continued to supply Goupil with pictures even after his return to Italy. In the meantime, Corcos became increasingly in demand as a portrait painter.
Corcos’ technical ability and masterful brushwork, as well as his ability to explore all the tones and harmonies of a single color, bears some comparison to the work of the American artists John Singer Sargent and James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Both artists worked in Paris, and it is almost certain that Corcos would have met Sargent, who was also a compadre of Boldini and de Nittis in the French capital. Sargent’s oeuvre, like that of Corcos, is dominated by portraits of the elite at the turn of the century, but like his Italian counterpart, Sargent, too, painted more languid scenes of the life of the leisure class, and in these experimented with unusual perspectives and interesting color harmonies, not dissimilar to the present work (fig. 1).
During the last decade of the 19th century, Corcos intermittently produced some unusual images of dangerously independent women that are the most distinctive of his works. The first of these, Sogni, which an instant succés de scandale when it was first exhibited in Florence in 1896, features a young woman, casually posed in a loose-fitting dress, sitting on a bench beside a well-thumbed stack of ‘yellow books’ who fixes the viewer with an enigmatic, sphinx-like gaze. An Afternoon on the Porch, although different in atmosphere to the more scandalous works in the artist’s oeuvre, is quite daring in many respects. The present work is both a genre painting and a double portrait of two of the artist’s stepchildren, Ada Rotigliano and one of her two brothers. The two figures are seated in a doorway, the elegantly dressed young man reading a newspaper, and young Ada seated on the step, a stack of well-thumbed, notorious ‘yellow books’ strewn on the red-tiled floor by her side. These so-called ‘libri gialli’ were novels considered to be of circumspect content and they were bound in non-descript yellow covers to warn readers of their racy content. The beautiful, dark-eyed woman confronts the viewer with a direct gaze, while her brother is absorbed in his reading. Ada captures the viewer in her gaze, almost daring a reprimand for her choice in literature and apologizing for nothing. She is the more engaged character in this tableau and the artist makes that abundantly clear. Her very demure white dress is broken by the bright yellow sash and string of coral beads, and the artist has taken the tonal values of yellow and white and imbued the entire scene with soft sunlight. The entire composition, with its daring spatial transitions from the open doorway to the vineyard beyond the wrought-iron balcony of the terrace, brings to mind the work of Edouard Manet (fig.2) and Gustave Caillebotte, (fig. 3).
Modigliani is now of the most famous of the 20th century artists and Corcos, at least outside Italy, is best remembered for his rather conventional society and royal portraits, although the artist also produced some breathtakingly beautiful and intimate images. An Afternoon on the Porch is one of these remarkable works. More and more attention is being paid to the artist, due in part to the 2014 at the Palazzo Zabarella in Padua, ‘Corcos: Dreams of the Belle Epoque’. The show included more than 100 works by the artist, 27 of which were shown publicly for the first time. Eighteen works in the show had not been exhibited for more than half a century.
Vittorio Corcos was a naturally gifted artist and at the age of sixteen was admitted directly into the second year at Florence’s Academia di Belle Arti. Two years later, with monies raised by the people of his hometown, the young artist moved on to Naples, where he studied with Domenico Morelli. In 1880, the purchase of one of Corcos’ pictures by King Umberto I provided him the necessary funds to make the essential journey to Paris.
Upon arriving in Paris, Corcos immediately introduced himself to Giuseppe de Nittis, who along with Giovanni Boldini, was the most successful Italian artist to relocate in Paris. At de Nittis’ salon, the young Corcos was introduced to Degas, Manet, Caillebotte, Daudet, Edmond de Goncourt along with many other leading artistic figures of fin-de-siècle Paris. De Nittis was also instrumental in introducing Corcos to the Maison Goupil. Corcos signed a contract with the French dealers which relieved him of all financial concerns, and he continued to supply Goupil with pictures even after his return to Italy. In the meantime, Corcos became increasingly in demand as a portrait painter.
Corcos’ technical ability and masterful brushwork, as well as his ability to explore all the tones and harmonies of a single color, bears some comparison to the work of the American artists John Singer Sargent and James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Both artists worked in Paris, and it is almost certain that Corcos would have met Sargent, who was also a compadre of Boldini and de Nittis in the French capital. Sargent’s oeuvre, like that of Corcos, is dominated by portraits of the elite at the turn of the century, but like his Italian counterpart, Sargent, too, painted more languid scenes of the life of the leisure class, and in these experimented with unusual perspectives and interesting color harmonies, not dissimilar to the present work (fig. 1).
During the last decade of the 19th century, Corcos intermittently produced some unusual images of dangerously independent women that are the most distinctive of his works. The first of these, Sogni, which an instant succés de scandale when it was first exhibited in Florence in 1896, features a young woman, casually posed in a loose-fitting dress, sitting on a bench beside a well-thumbed stack of ‘yellow books’ who fixes the viewer with an enigmatic, sphinx-like gaze. An Afternoon on the Porch, although different in atmosphere to the more scandalous works in the artist’s oeuvre, is quite daring in many respects. The present work is both a genre painting and a double portrait of two of the artist’s stepchildren, Ada Rotigliano and one of her two brothers. The two figures are seated in a doorway, the elegantly dressed young man reading a newspaper, and young Ada seated on the step, a stack of well-thumbed, notorious ‘yellow books’ strewn on the red-tiled floor by her side. These so-called ‘libri gialli’ were novels considered to be of circumspect content and they were bound in non-descript yellow covers to warn readers of their racy content. The beautiful, dark-eyed woman confronts the viewer with a direct gaze, while her brother is absorbed in his reading. Ada captures the viewer in her gaze, almost daring a reprimand for her choice in literature and apologizing for nothing. She is the more engaged character in this tableau and the artist makes that abundantly clear. Her very demure white dress is broken by the bright yellow sash and string of coral beads, and the artist has taken the tonal values of yellow and white and imbued the entire scene with soft sunlight. The entire composition, with its daring spatial transitions from the open doorway to the vineyard beyond the wrought-iron balcony of the terrace, brings to mind the work of Edouard Manet (fig.2) and Gustave Caillebotte, (fig. 3).