“I love solitude and the mountains. I feel the mountains as living beings. They reveal their mysteries to me.”

Frequently addressed as from the late 1920s, the mountain landscape was one of the artist’s favourite subjects. As he stated in an interview after World War II: “I love solitude and the mountains. I feel the mountains as living beings. They reveal their mysteries to me.”¹ In another interview, he told his friend Dino Campini how this lasting passion had originated during the “period of war spent on the peaks, in the Alpine caverns, in the snow […] Painting a mountain does not mean drawing the outline you see from a distance. Descriptions of the minor romantic kind interspersed with Millet-style cows and sprinkled with flowers are not permitted. A mountain is not a garden but a tragedy, the wrath of a furious, unleashed divinity.”² 

The iconographic source of the rocky mountain background bristling with crags is 14th- and 15th-century painting, above all the beloved frescoes by Masolino in Castiglione Olona, of which he wrote as follows about a decade later: 

“While those 14th-century syntheses were superb, as harsh and barren as the land where miracles and terrible, mythic events took place, the nearby mountains were also beautiful and fascinating in the massive, square volume of their breathtaking succession […] primitive and child-like but grand and profound from afar. […] Mountains of fresco lime and touches of Naples yellow with volumes in bolder colour, clear and limpid in form, an immediate and powerful poetic element, in the background of episodes of John the Baptist and the perverse Herodias. The archaic tang of the mountains of Varese in the Biblical settings is, however, infinitely more effective than so many skilfully produced realistic and touristic mountain scenes of current painting.”³ 

Departing from the philosophical abstraction of his “neoclassical” work of the mid-1920s, the artist turned at the end of the decade in a brutally physical, expressionist direction with gestural brushwork and an accentuation of threedimensional substance culminating in the works shown at the 1931 Rome Quadriennale. In 1926 Cecchi perceived the emergence of what he described as a “17th-century” taste, an accentuated pursuit of pictorial effects aimed at “sculptural abstraction”⁴ that “takes the human figure back into a strange prehistory”.⁵ Attention was often drawn to the cerebral nature of his art.⁶ In 1929 Oppo too authoritatively noted the evolution of these characteristics, now ripened into evident expressionism: “Strong and violent painting […] the bitterness of an artistic drama in which the 17th and 20th centuries are the opposed protagonists”.⁷ It was, however, at the Quadriennale of 1931, where Sironi showed his latest works, that this violent, expressionist, summary and ebullient style emerged together with a clear reference to Rouault, underestimated by contemporary critics but admired even then by Marziano Bernardi⁸ and taken up by Pallucchini: 

“Mario Sironi is unquestionably that most daring innovator on the scene of presentday painting. With a turbulence worthy of Rouault, he develops an agitated, 17thcentury emphasis on chiaroscuro in his paintings. His compositions, authentic pictorial nightmares, are often laid out in a polemically cerebral atmosphere […]. The phenomenon of his painting is indicative of a taste of his period for the abnormal, absurd and monstrous, not so much Latin in origin as lurking rather in certain unhealthy layers of European cultures.”⁹

“Torment”, “agitation”, “Gothic fury” and “Romantic heroism” were among the terms most frequently used by critics to describe the new works presented at the 1931 Quadriennale. 

This work, with is effective handling of space, belongs to the first phase in which Sironi addressed the beloved subject of the mountain landscape, which he was then to develop extensively until his death with tireless passion. While some previous examples can be found in his illustrations as early as 1921-22 and in sometimes large background elements of paintings like the Viandante (Wayfarer, 1926) and Famiglia (Family, 1927-28) in the Galleria Comunale d’Arte Moderna in Rome, it was this period that saw the birth of an authentic series of paintings in which mountains play the leading role in the composition in grand and austere isolation. Broadly painted, they became for Sironi an intensely lyrical, contemplative and romantic theme. The paint is thickly applied in a gestural expressionism of extraordinary dramatic power with whole areas summarily and indeed almost “barbarically” addressed. The chromatic range of dark hues is illuminated in the blues and whites of the sky. 

Dating between 1930 and 1931, this landscape expresses the violent expressive pathos that Sironi instilled into pictorial substance in this period, as though shaken by a wind that distorts trees, hills and rocks with no distinction. The “stark and stormy but […] firm and fluid”¹⁰ landscapes shown at the Rome Quadriennale of 1931 must have been like this. The isolated and absolute presence of the bare tree has the intensity of a figure with its branches like outstretched arms. 

Fabio Benzi 

The work was already in the Cerruti Collection in June 1993, as demonstrated by the handwritten inventory of assets in the villa in Rivoli drawn up during that month [Ed.].

¹ Danti 1956.

² Campini 1953.

³ Sironi 1937.

⁴ Cecchi 1926; see also La Fiera Letteraria, 21 February 1926. Sironi’s painting was described as “17th-century” also by Margherita Sarfatti (Sarfatti 1931), who had herself challenged the use of this adjective (secentista) in 1926 (Sarfatti 1926). By the end of the decade, the artist’s work was explicitly characterised by pictorial and expressive pathos.

⁵ Becca 1926.

⁶ See Pavolini 1926; Becca 1926; Oppo 1926, pp. 225-228.

⁷ Oppo 1929.

⁸ Bernardi 1931.

⁹ Pallucchini 1931.

¹⁰ Ibid.