I’m on my way back to Bradford at the end of my Italian holiday. As I did on the way out, I’m stopping over in Milan for a bit of a cultural fix. This afternoon I had the time to go to the Gallery of Modern Art to catch up on some of my favourites. It turned out to be rather more of an obstacle course than expected, because thay are in the middle of putting things back to rights after redecoration, and about a half of the works still don’t have labels. The staff were running around handing out sheets of paper.
One of the high-points of the afternoon was the chance for me to renew my acquaintance with their works by Segantini. I have never been able to put my finger on just why his stuff appeals to me, but it does. (Perhaps it is our shared love of the mountains.) In the bookshop on the way out I spotted a little monograph about him, and have been looking at it after dinner this evening. It contained a phrase that caught my attention, refering to “the coherence between his life and his art”.
How does that come about? Really I am not sure that I have come anywhere close to that. Surely there is much more implied here than the fact that the artist was able to construct a good deal of his work around images of the landscape he loved. “Coherence” implies much more than that.
This is going to give me plenty to reflect on during tomorrow’s tedious journey back to Bradford.
By the way: I discovered this afternoon that there is, in fact, a “contemporary gallery” in Milan. I’ve lamented in the past the difficulty of finding opportunitirs to see contemporary Italian work here. Then I discovered that the current exhibition is by artists from Brasil. Ah well!