Focus on Brazil: in the long term Eliseu Visconti wins if Europe makes war

Almost unknown to Italian art historians, despite he was born near Salerno – precisely in Giffoni Valle Piana –, Eliseo D’Angelo Visconti, better known as Eliseu Visconti (1866-1944), is an artist that Italy and the other contentious UE members should study carefully to understand, once again, what was effectively happening in the world at the beginning of the XX century. While the lights of Parisian culture were illuminating the path leading to that catastrophic events that made possible the accelerated development of United States, and indirectly also that of China and Brazil, this extremely sensitive artist set up a fundamental one-way bridge to South America, where his carrier blossomed thanks to opportunities Europe would probably have never given to him.

 

As the artist’s biography clearly proves, his talent had indeed been recognised by leading Parisian art institutions. In 1892, at the age of 26 and after almost 20 years spent in Brazil, he travelled back to Paris. There he won the admission to the prestigious Ècole des Beaux Arts and to the Academie Julien studying with Bouguereau and Gabriel Ferrier. He also attended the École Guérin, where he became a pupil of the art nouveau master Eugène Grasset. Then he was accepted at the Salon de la Nationale des Beaux Arts and at the Salon of the Société of des Artistes Français. His paintings “Gioventú” (1898) and “As Oréadas” (1899) received a silver medal at the seminal Exposition Universelle occurred in 1900, where he was among the representatives of the Brazilian art in Europe.

 

But while the doors of success were opening up in the ville lumière, the Great War slowly came about, thus urging Visconti and his family back to South America. Here he had solo exhibitions, the best market a successful painter could have at that time, and the privilege of decorating main Brazilian cultural institutions such as the Theatro Municipal in Rio de Janeiro (he painted the curtain, plafond and proscenium before 1909, while in 1914 he executed a cycle of paintings for the foyer) and the Biblioteca Nacional (1911). After 1920 and until his death he never travelled to Europe again.

 

To a western eye he is not an artist as powerful as Gustave Klimt – even if a parallel between the two would not be inappropriate – and his personal friendship with Paul Gauguin didn’t turn his life into the kind of universal model that Gauguin’s life was, and still is. But thanks to their acid, sometimes disturbing sensuality, or to their golden and warm atmosphere, Eliseu’s paintings are so far the best mirror of a society that since then has been shaping his own identity in a totally different way from that chosen by some new emerging economies – that is to say buying ridiculously expensive masterpieces at auction and investing huge money in building spectacular museums. On the contrary, Eliseu Visconti’ works and personal experience may help you realizing how blind we had been thinking that war would have been at some point even convenient. Along with human lives, resources, heritage and political power, at that time we started to lose the fundamental ability to attract talents, who brought their good ideas to more advantageous grounds.

November 25, 2020