Luigi Lucioni (1900-1988)

Guiseppe Luigi Carlo Benvenuto Lucioni enjoyed a prosperous sixty-year career. Known simply as Luigi Lucioni, at just thirty-two years old, the Italian-born artist became the first and youngest contemporary American painter to have a work purchased by Metropolitan Museum of Art (Pears with Pewter, 1930). His original painting style spared him from the contentiousness of Modernist circles and attracted major attention from museums, critics and reliable patronage. While he respected the artistic trends of the period, Lucioni looked beyond what was in-vogue in favor of technical skill. He said, “My fundamental belief is to paint life as I see it in all its forms, but I also believe in superb craftsmanship and have based my ideas of the craftsmanship in the works of the 14th, 15th, and 17th centuries. I also find tremendous achievement in the French painters of Cézanne, Renoir, and Degas caliber…I believe that an artist should be a master of his craft regardless of what his own particular viewpoint is. My demands are only craftsmanship” (L. Lucioni, quoted in S. Embury, The Art and Life of Luigi Lucioni: A Contribution Towards a Catalogue Raisonné, Holdrege, 2006, pp. 30-31).

Lucioni’s exposure to Renaissance art derived from a trip back to Italy in 1925, following years of study at Cooper Union and the National Academy of Design in New York. After experiencing what he felt was a revelation on these travels, the trajectory of his work changed forever. Studying “with the thoroughness of a scholar,” according to the journalist Adeline Lobdell Pynchon, Lucioni’s findings in Italy gave him a newfound self-assurance in his own work. Pynchon reported him recalling, “I felt that the old masters must have had a passionate belief in themselves, in their own methods, or they wouldn’t have produced those great works of art. It gave me confidence in myself” (S. Embury, ibid, p. 81). Accordingly, Lucioni adopted the confident realism achieved by the Old Masters, such as Botticelli and Piero della Francesca, painting with painstaking attention to detail and design. He faithfully rendered his subjects down to the most miniscule of details, even being rumored to paint every leaf on a tree.

As demonstrated by the present work, still lifes allowed Lucioni to nurture his vision by bringing together intricate patterns, textures and color into one arrangement. An impressive and early example, Red Checkered Table Cloth exhibits his exceptional talent for creating diverse compositions. The artist accounts for all details, from the creases of the tablecloth, to the imperfections in the walls, to the subtle reflection captured in the glass. The artist explains, “…I deliberately thought these things out beforehand… you try awfully hard to make a still life look as though it was casual… but I don’t think there is anything casual in art… very often they look contrived, but my idea was to sort of compose things, but to put the realism in so it would look as if it were there” (L. Lucioni, quoted in B. Robertson, Twentieth-Century American Art: The Ebsworth Collection, exh. cat., Washington, D.C., 1999, p. 170).