Jean - Luc Baroni Ltd

Vincenzo Gemito Young Woman

Print

Vincenzo Gemito

Naples 1852-1929        

 

 

A Young Woman, Barefoot with a Red Shawl, Seated leaning on an Urn

Signed and dated: GeMITO/ 1913.
Black chalk, point of the brush and black ink and watercolour and gouache on grey-green paper.
393 x 297 mm (15 1/3 x 11 ¾) in.)


Vincenzo Gemito holds a unique position in Italian art of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries; broadly famous as a sculptor he was also a draughtsman of exceptional brilliance. Mostly self-taught, his sculptures, both in terms of quality and technique belong, nevertheless, to the tradition of classical statuary and the great Renaissance masters and are characterised by a fusion of naturalism and grace.  Rebellious and independent by nature, he also had a voracious appetite for culture and learning. Gemito was abandoned as a child, left on the doorstep of a Foundling Hospital in Naples. At the age of 9, he pleaded with a local sculptor to be allowed into the workshop as an apprentice, using the churches, of Naples as museums in which he could absorb the work of the 17th and 18th Century painters and the Museo Arcologico as his greatest source for learning.

Gemito’s first success came at the age of 16 when he sold a sculpture to the King of Italy, Vittorio Emmanuele II. Ten years later, he moved to Paris, where he met Giovanni Boldini (who lent him money) and made particular friends with Ernest Meissonier.  He began exhibiting at the Paris Salons, winning the Grand Prix in 1889. Gemito returned to Naples in 1880 whilst continuing to send work to Paris, but from 1887 he suffered bouts of mental illness and increasingly and for most of the next twenty years, limited himself to drawing. He spent almost a year on Capri, his chief model being his wife, Anna Cutolo.

Drawing was at the heart of his realistic and detailed approach to sculpture and over time, he produced an enormous number of figure and portrait studies in various media: pen, chalk, pastel and watercolour and sometimes a combination of all of these.  His work on paper was the structure on which his sculptures were based but his drawings are also of exceptional aesthetic quality in their own right1.

The present figure study has a monumental and distinctly classical quality which clearly illustrates Gemito’s love of the aesthetics of antiquity. The model is most probably a Neapolitan girl, perhaps a street seller but she is similar in type to a girl in a tempera profile study which is inscribed Genazzano  and was drawn by Gemito in 1915 whilst he was staying in Genazzano, a small town near Rome.  There he appears to have produced numerous studies of young people, a noted quality amongst them being their transcendence into timelessness. Alberto Savinio, a biographer of Gemito described this process: La creatura mortale diventa immortale ..2’

In 1913, the year of the present work, Gemito was living in Naples, in an apartment in the Parco Grifeo area.  A portrait of his assistant Masto Ciccio, shown in the 2009 exhibition, is drawn in an extremely similar technique, dated to the same year and signed in a like manner with the downward stroke of the G leading to the right. It is described in the catalogue as being masterful in technique and having great freedom in its mixture of mediums as well as a modernity of interpretation rarely seen amongst his contemporaries3. The same may be said of this moving study of a young woman, who with her sideways gaze and tri-colour costume takes on the combined qualities of grace and severity which both recall Raphael and anticipate the formal, monumental studies by Picasso of around 19204. The layered and colourful technique of Gemito’s beautiful drawing of course also shows how thoroughly painterly this sculptor-draughtsman could be.


1.    See Bruno Mantura, qualche considerazione sui disegni di Gemito, essay in exhibition catalogue, Gemito,  Naples, Museo Diego Aragona Pignatelli Cortes, 2009, p.49.
2.    See exhibition catalogue, op. cit., p.157, cat.48.
3.    See exhibition catalogue, op. cit., p.151, cat.42.
4.    See for example the Three Woman at a Fountain, in the Musée Picasso, of 1921, exhibition catalogue, Picasso et les Maîtres, Paris and London, 2008-9, p.145.

7-8 Mason's Yard, Duke Street, St James's, London SW1Y 6BU – info@jlbaroni.com – Tel. +44 20 7930 5347

We use cookies to improve our website and your experience when using it. Cookies used for the essential operation of the site have already been set. To find out more about the cookies we use and how to delete them, see our Privacy Policy.

I accept cookies from this site