Giovanni Segantini

The earliest paintings of Giovanni Segantini (1858-1899) date back to the 1870s, when the artist was still in his native Italy enduring a life of extreme poverty. It was not until he moved to Switzerland, around 1883, that Segantini found his métier and subject matter: the Alps. Working largely outdoors, Segantini developed a style later tagged Divisionist, in which agglomerated optical effects are derived from the separation of colors into individual dots or patches. Published on the occasion of a comprehensive exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Segantini unites the artist's earliest works from Northern Italy with his depictions of Savoyan peasant life and the later paintings of the Engadin mountains that mark the apex of his career. Scholarly essays elucidate the important role that the "painter of light" played in paving the way for modernism.