BRUNO CIVITICO American Classicism Catalog Design: Phillip Collier Design Studio, Metairie, Louisiana Phillip Collier | Chris Williams THE BO BARTLETT CENTER COLLEGE OF THE ARTS, COLUMBUS STATE UNIVERSITY BRUNO CIVITICO American Classicism BRUNO CIVITICO’S AMERICAN CLASSICISM By David Carbone uring the 1960’s a number of important figurative painters suffused by a soft luminosity that kept shadows close to the objects that rejected the prevalent modes of abstraction, painterly cast them. His simplified descriptive brushwork dispensed with superfluous expressionism, photography and consumer culture as a detail, delivered in a thick paste of direct touches, like Neil Welliver’s way of moving toward self-realization. They brought their contemporary landscapes. This emphasis on the painting itself as an object, knowledge of abstraction to working from life and began draws attention to its underlying harmonic structure and intervals, to the Dto re-examine the assumptions previous realists had readily accepted. In modulation of space and light: essentially to its sense as a whole. This idyllic addition, the traditional discipline of figure drawing had essentially withered order—the painting’s “music”—comes out of a distinct classical sensibility, during the post-war era, a correlative effect of the growth of university an off-shoot of the counter culture to set against the brutality of the time. art departments, fueled by the G.I. Bill. This was also a bi-product of the In a canvas of 1972, before a cleared pasture of New England farmland: academization of abstraction. Furthermore, without a coherent American a comely naked youth holding reed pipes sits on a tree stump, absorbed in culture to draw from, each artist realized that he or she would have to forge thought: the god Pan. Well, not quite the god of the Greeks, he has none a “personal tradition,” creating a unique lineage of artists across time and of the usual attributes of a faun or a satyr, but he does claim music, and cultures. This generation would re-invent objective approaches shorn of the implicitly, its irrational potential to transform us, much as the painter sentimentality and bathos of illustration, social realism or semi-surrealism in is a transformer. It may be a symbolic portrait of Civitico the artist, a order to successfully compete with the best abstraction. declaration of his ambition: to depict both the dream of Arcadia and its Toward the end of the decade, Bruno Civitico began exhibiting post- corresponding “trouble in paradise,” inspired by retelling tales from Ovid, painterly realist figures in New York. Throughout his career, Civitico’s forms for his generation. tend toward an extreme sculptural tactility—the presence of things—which Throughout the seventies—his time in Portsmouth, New Hampshire— holds the key to the expressiveness of his work. His earliest works showed a Civitico set many of his mythic tableaux in rooms of the colonial house that sympathy for the closely observed perceptual representation of Philip Pearlstein, he had restored, connecting his classical impulse to the Puritan simplicity building form through large shapes in pale-toned values. This way of modeling of the Federalist period: an American Classicism. Despite an increased is distinctly modernist: opaque paint strokes in both the lights and shadows, attention to realist detail, Civitico composed with a keen attention to the painted in sharp focus on a large scale in a pared-down environment. This interlocking relationships of large planes of tone derived from his study of initially placed his work alongside other similarly “cool” figurative painters such works by Juan Gris, the “classical” cubist. This is especially evident in two of as William Bailey, Gabriel Laderman, and Alfred Leslie. his most luminously sensuous depictions of Danaë and Io. A generation younger than the rest, Civitico quickly distinguished One of Civitico’s most austere works, “The Testament of Eudamidas,” himself by developing an overt modernist classicism, quite unlike the is inspired by Poussin’s famous work on the theme of moral responsibility. kitschy classicism of the late nineteenth century. He boldly drew on The story is taken from Lucian’s dialogue of Stoic philosophy on friendship, Picasso’s laconic neo-classical figures, stripping them of their lumpen “Toxaris.” Civitico’s modern version pays tribute both to his parents comedy and instilling their simplified pink and grey bodies with a lyric and indirectly his artist friend and mentor, the painter-theorist Gabriel animation in scenes of bathers by a lake. Civitico’s work had quickly moved Laderman. Civitico posed his father, as Eudamidas on his deathbed, from perceptual observation to synthetic invention, set in landscapes dictating his will to a scribe, bequeathing responsibility for his mother and 2 3 daughter, depicted on the far side of the bed, to two close friends, who will of the universe and Divine will. As we move from the sill of symbolic subsequently rise to their moral charge. forms, and peer at and through the glass, we notice a severe distillation of What is startlingly fresh here, is Civitico’s depiction of the room where realism that signals a more complex abstract meditation. In the window the scene is played out. While the wall on the right runs straight back, setting glass, distortions of the room, reflections of a bright window behind us the interior as rectangular, Civitico curves the space from the right to the left play against two landscapes on the far wall; the effect produces a visual so that everything depicted recedes obliquely, as if we, like the artist, have just “stream of consciousness,” not unlike cinematic montage. On the side wall entered the room and are taking in each moment, turning our head and eyes above the fireplace Gabriel Laderman’s painting “Homage to David” (1969) to survey the scene. Thus, Civitico is directing our exploration of the painting holds a place of honor. Echoing the composition of David’s famous “Death as a subjective experience. Entering the room moments before him, Civitico of Marat”, it was painted to honor the martyrdoms of Martin Luther King painted his girlfriend, bending forward as she approaches the bed, casting a and Robert Kennedy. Civitico has produced a superlative meditation on the foreboding shadow across the floor and onto the body of Eudamidas. transience of his life in art, its relation to Nature’s illusions and underlying This way of mapping space is in accord with our bi-cameral vision and reality: it’s a masterly summation. As a retrospective view, it is unique in the is central to the “new” in realism and was much discussed and written about history of allegorical still lifes. by Laderman, whose name appears in a dedication to him held by the scribe ***** in the far end of the room, depicting the artist himself. This work gives us Drawing is a way of thinking. It is a means of learning to understand a sense of Civitico’s seriousness: a moral tale, not unlike a fairytale, in its through a creative act, in a unique process of contemplation, what it is that pictorial conception. one sees or imagines. In drawing from life, a person comes to understand In the mid-eighties, Civitico left New England for Charleston, South the endless varieties of natural beauty, especially in the diversity of human Carolina where he settled into another house near the harbor from the beings. Ultimately, drawing leads to empathy; as we draw, we forget 1830’s: this time it was a spacious neo-classical villa and an environment ourselves and pay attention to something or someone and come to identify more suitable to an American born in Italy. Here, in this congenial southern with what we see. atmosphere he has continued his subject pictures, portraits, landscapes, The drawings in the present exhibition are grouped in four sections: still lifes and his major commission, the Clemson University mural on the portraits, male figures, female figures and composition studies. The works performing arts. range across decades of his working life and reflect some of Civitico’s diverse A recent painting, on view at the the exhibit’s entrance, features a pictorial interests. The mastery of these studies and sketches allows no still life of three objects representing idealized geometric forms, set before erasure; all changes are part of what the artist shares with us, his process of an interior window that opens into another room and beyond through a analysis and conception, his felt thought. second window to a flowering hedge. The objects are set out on a ledge, in In the earliest drawing, an adolescent self-portrait, the form of the head an iconic format, suggesting a transformation from a solid sphere to a ball has an extreme sculptural presence with a minimum of modeling and a sense of twine, revealing voids in the shape of pentagons which come together of independence and inwardness. In two seated figures, the highly sensitive as a solid in the third object, a dodecahedron; if the sphere represents use of red chalk, or conté crayon shows Civitico’s ability to capture light ideas of completeness and acceptance it transitions to an idealized symbol revealing form in one, and the subtle modulation of atmosphere in the other. 4 5 In two essentially linear drawings, we are presented with a profile descending they are done in ink and wash to help focus the artist’s purpose. Here we from Roman coins and in the other the contemplative motif of reading. have selected five distinct types. One is a breezy sketch in ink of three Careful articulation of anatomical knowledge is brought to our women bathers set before a lake; even so, it suggests a moody atmosphere, attention in the drawings of men because muscle, sinew and bone are like Corot’s Cliché-verres.