Vittore Grubicy De Dragon
An intellectual-artist and his legacy

Name: Vittore Grubicy De Dragon
Start: 2022-04-08 00:00:00
End: 2022-07-10 00:00:00
Location: Museum of the City of Livorno

Museum of the City of Livorno

Livorno, Tuscany, Italy

The show

Vittore Grubicy De Dragon , at the Museum of the City of Livorno from 8 April to 10 July , really offers what it promises in the title, that is, to observe how and to what extent this new intellectual figure was at the time a singular artist as well as a gallerist and discoverer of talents, and how it influenced the international art scene between divisionism and symbolism.

This very rich exhibition, born from a project by Sergio Rebora and Aurora Scotti Tosini, promoted by the Livorno Foundation and created by the Livorno Foundation - Art and Culture together with the Municipality of Livorno, follows several parallel threads of the story: man, first of all, his passions, his life choices, the Italian and international environments he frequented - never passively - and the art of his time, which he was able to anticipate, guide, promote and then himself interpret. that it was coming, of which it seizes the opportunities, above all those offered by the advances in reproduction techniques, perfect for creating a new market or flooding it. All in years in which we pass from the scapigliatura, to the divisionism reaching up to the beginnings of futurism. As punctually, and with a wealth of testimonies, the Livorno exhibition documents.

It is Vittore himself, portrayed in different moments of his life, who introduces the visitor to the nine large sections of the exhibition who, thanks also to the possibility of drawing on the unpublished materials preserved by the heirs of Ettore Benvenuti (paintings, drawings, engravings, documents, photographs, furnishing objects, furnishings ...) allow us to propose a private dimension of man, until now little or never explored. The Grubicy belong to a noble Magyar family transplanted to Milan. Mamma Antonietta is a painter for pleasure but in the house there are the paintings of the most promising artists of the moment, which is the one between the 70s and 80s of the nineteenth century.

His brother Alberto manages the Gubricy Gallery on his own, which played an important role until the early 1920s. Vittore, on the other hand, takes the path of critic and promoter, curating the first retrospectives of Tranquillo Cremona and Daniele Ranzoni, supporting and hosting Giovanni Segantini at his debut in his home who pushes him to deepen his knowledge of Millet and French naturalism, but also taking care of the young man Angelo Morbelli, by Achille Tominetti and Serafino Macchiati. Realizing the international potential of Italian art, he proposed the memorable “Italian Exhibition” at the London Expo in 1888. In the Netherlands, where he lives for a long time, he frequents and establishes relationships with the major exponents of the Hague School and begins to draw and paint himself. Then comes the falling in love with Japan and the Far East. Learn Japanese language and writing and collects remarkable testimonies of that civilization that he brings to Europe. At the same time he supported the first Milanese symbolist instances: Previati, first of all, but also Conconi and Troubetzkoy.