WTI Magazine #61    2015 May, 29
Author : Enrico De Iulis      Translation by: John Cabot University

A comprehensive and exhaustive exhibition is currently being set up in the gorgeous complex of Museums of San Domenico, in Forlì. It aims at presenting the striking career of one of the most famous and requested Italian painters of the turn of last century: Giovanni Boldini. His career winds its way through Florence, Paris, and Rome. He anticipated the genre of the portrait and reinvented it as social, fashionable, and glamour.

Throughout the exhibition, the beginning of his career is documented by his first studio paintings, charcoal sketches, and en plain air views – common theme among mid nineteenth century artists (especially Tuscan). The show then focuses on his sojourn in Paris, on his close friendship with Degas, and on the movement that breaks through his art, which is both fuzzy (resuming a Post-impressionist style) and full of flakes and agitated lines. Subsequently, the exhibition displays his first paintings of naked models literally immersed into draperies, feathers, upper-middle-class interiors, chinoiserie, and fin de siècle Parisian orientalisms. Such belle époque craziness together with a great talent for portraiture defines Boldini's unique style. Throughout these large pictures (almost human-size) the portraits always appear focusing on the face, until the smallest clear and outlined detail. When portraying men, every detail of elegance is clearly visible, proper, and well shown. While, when representing high-society women, everything goes crazy around them. Only faces remain in sharp focus, while clothes, feathers, lace, and necklaces swirl around. Everything conveys dynamism, yet the picture remains a portrait, where fixity is the rule.

This ability to manage both color and trait results in an oxymoron, being portrait a static representation of a person. On the contrary, such person appears here in the middle of a frenetic color that springs out from clothes, wall-papers, furniture, or accessories. This is pure fashion, and foretells the idea of our modern edited shootings. Thanks to Boldini, portraiture became à la mode, as to own one of his portraits meant to be trendy. His ladies are like flowers seen up close and colored petals are their clothes, where the fast trait of the pastel or the lump of the tempera defines the detail of a shoulder or of a belt.

Boldini reinterpreted Impressionism in terms of social representation. A section of the exhibition is dedicated to this very Italian taste for portraiture, which owes its success to the presence of other Italian artists in Paris, like Zandomenighi, Corcos, and Modigliani. Moreover, a glimpse on the imminent Futurist style appears in the details of the folds of the skirts, which perfectly mirror the descriptive taste of the chinoiserie or of the English and Macchiaioli wallpapers.

The modern taste for speed and luxury as fashionable trends are social factors that Boldini was able to display in his works thanks to his really devilish talent.