The Painter’s Eye

Featuring Contemporary Conversation by Luigi Lucioni

This month, the Painter’s Eye heads east to ask Susan Talbot-Stanaway, director of the Zanesville Museum of Art, about her favorite painting in the museum’s collections.

“Luigi Lucioni’s (1900-1988) Contemporary Conversation (oil on canvas, 1933), is my favorite in the collections. Instead of the traditional still-life of fruit or flowers, Lucioni has assembled objects that articulate his autobiography and identity as a painter.

“For example, the print of Sandro Botticelli’s Man with a Medal (1475) on the table seems to represent Lucioni’s study of the Italian Renaissance. The entire composition is built on the idea of dialogue: between the artist and his subject matter, between the artist and the viewer, between the art of the past and modernism. In 1932, at the height of his popularity, Lucioni became the youngest artist to have a painting purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.”

Lucioni was an artist very much aware of the tradition of the Renaissance, with the scrupulous attention to the visible details and a smooth surface quality of the paint, but he was never beholden to it. Always painting from life, Lucioni did not really copy nature as much as he rearranged what he saw to give the painting a hyper-aware clarity. The large shape of the cactus, for example, is echoed by the shape of trees in the landscape we can see out the window.

As the critic Henry McBride said in 1934, “The bait used is realism, but in this

case, there is realism and something more.”

The Zanesville museum has two new shows up right now: Two Printmakers: Kathy McGhee, Nicholas Hill and Creative Statements: Ohio Art Quilts 2012. Learn more at www.zanesvilleart.org cs