Description:
LEONARDO DUDREVILLE
(Venice, 1885 - Gniffa, 1975)
Landscape, 1920
Oil on canvas 75x120 cm
Signed and dated lower right "L.DUDREVILLE/920"
Work registered with the Leonardo Dudreville Archive of Monza N L.D.201
Bibliography: Tra le righe. Twenty-four artists of the Italian twentieth century through images and words, edited by G.Cribiori, 9cento Milano Edizioni, 2023, p 16
The work is situated at the end of Dudreville's excellent Futurist period, from which he was ousted from the core group of signatories of the Manifesto by Umberto Boccioni.
Curiously, from Paris, his friend Anselmo Bucci warned him to be careful of intrigues and envy: "Remember that you are surrounded by wolves, who have already spoken to me of paintings without limits and fireworks. Beware of a Balilla-Pratella Libero-Mar Pacifico-Gino Boccioni union. Avoid the bloc. And at Campari, talk about courtesans." (Bucci Fiesole Archive, now in Pontiggia, 1999, p.15)
After this disappointment, before becoming one of the most refined and admired hyper-realistic painters on the Italian scene, Dudreville allows himself an intermediate passage, in which he adopts different pictorial modes, from divisionism to pointillism. The singular rendering of volumes, together with a precious chromatic vivacity, are the main characteristics of this excellent work, which place it in relation to "Il cantiere" ((in Leonardo Dudreville - Silvana Ed. 2004, edited by E.Pontiggia, fig 31) always from 1920, with which it presents multiple similarities.
