“The Garden and the Moon”, the journey of the art historian Marco Goldin from Romanticism to Impressionism arrives for The Ship of Theseus
«I have always loved nature as a child, very soon. This is why I like to tell and write about it. For this reason, even more, I love the painting that describes it, it makes it vibrate in a silent song. Something that makes you think of forever ».
To tell the history of art, Marco Goldin, the curatorial critic who has made over 400 exhibitions a reality since 1984 (the most recent Van Gogh. The colors of life, at the San Gaetano center of Padua, October 2020-June 2021), once again he intertwines his passion for artists and their works with his personal history, somehow with his private. «The painting of nature – he writes again in the introduction to his new book The garden and the moon leaving for Theseus’ ship on 21 October – it came upon me. Like a song, like something that flows and gives life ». Something, this time, particularly disruptive given that «The nineteenth century is the century of nature».
Of Nature (his and the artists) Marco Goldin he writes once again, overturning many clichés, starting with the choice of not particularly well-known painters such as Balke, Durand or Buttura, not just masters. From the beginning, right from the quotes by Virginia Wool, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Eduardo Galeano intertwines painting, writing and poetry: in the appendix, three chapters dedicated to as many poets (TS Eliot, Attilio Bertolucci, Goffredo Parise) who were fundamental in the sentimental training of Goldin’s painting writing. To them he reserves a few dozen pages focused above all on the relationship between man and nature, the same one from which his two poetic texts originate and that the critic poses, with the title Light of the beginning, at the beginning of the book.
Thus continuing his critical and historical reconnaissance of 19th century international art, Goldin focuses on the nineteenth century of Europe and America, in search of unexpected parallels, tracing a sort of new author’s geography. Monet, Sohlberg, Moran, Peterssen, Church, Babbitt, Kensett, Remington, Moran, Bazille, Constable, Ciardi: Goldin gives voice to the most famous artists, but also knows how to reserve his attention to much less frequented (and seen) characters, equally fascinating.
Of this trip, France certainly remains the permanent center of gravity, as well as the heart of the entire nineteenth-century art. And it is up to France to end Goldin’s journey (and book) with six chapters dedicated to impressionism and to the great painters who made it successful, from Monet to Renoir, from Cézanne to Degas to Manet.
Goldin, however, prefers to start from the extraordinary romantic season, between Germany and England, from Friedrich to Turner to Constable. America is a milestone in the journey by Goldin: the America of Hudson River School painters (Thomas Cole, Edwin Church) and Winslow Homer’s Star and Striped Impressionism. While the enchanting realism in Scandinavia appears surprising (a real discovery beyond the already celebrated Vilhelm Hammershøi, protagonist in 2019 of a beautiful monographic at the Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris). Just as nature reinterpreted by Nicolae Grigorescu and Sandor Brodskye in the center of Europe is surprising. A nature that, once again, is first of all a mirror of the soul.
October 17, 2021 (change October 17, 2021 | 09:28)
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