Lucioni Lights Up Vermont’s Shelburne Museum

A bit of Art Deco, a dash of Hudson River School, a little Renaissance, and all Vermont

L uigi Lucioni: Modern Light is the new exhibition at the Shelburne Museum saluting Vermont’s painter laureate. Lucioni (1900–1988) was a Modernist and good at landscapes, portraits, and still lifes, though his calling card and bread and butter are quiet views of old Vermont towns set in the mountains, Vermont’s ubiquitous birch trees, and its well-worn red barns. It’s a handsome, lucid, and amenable exhibition as well as a scholarly introduction to Lucioni for people who don’t know him. The Shelburne Museum, both a history and an art museum, always does good shows.

Village of Stowe, from 1931, introduces the exhibition. Stowe’s a famous, chichi ski town now, but ski tourism in Vermont is a post-war proposition. Yes, people skied, but there wasn’t a chair lift until the ’40s. Skiers enjoyed the minute-long thrill slide down part of Mount Mansfield, but then there was the slog up by leg power and then a rope lift. It was for the locals. For others, and that means rich New Yorkers, Stowe was a summer place.

Village of Stowe is picture-postcard Vermont. It’s a very good painting, too, among the artist’s best and most famous, at least among Vermont cognoscenti. Lucioni picks a spot where the little town, then having about 1,500 people, looks rolled out, delivered to a valley by hills that seem to have churned it. Mount Mansfield is a soothing presence. The land flowing from the Green Mountains is part woods, part farm. Vermont’s palette isn’t complicated. It’s easy. It’s a hundred greens in summer, here and there brown, then as many reds in fall, yellow if the summer’s too dry, white in winter with touches of mauve and turquoise, and then there’s mud season.

Stowe’s Community Church steeple isn’t too emphatic. Vermont does little in extremes. It’s a lovely bit of punctuation and, amid supple, undulating forms, a bit of geometry. Adumbrated geometry. I look at Lucioni as an Art Deco painter, and, odd as it seems, Village of Stowe’s rectangles and triangles, crisp and clear, among round trees is an Art Deco look. Most of the buildings, like the church, are tucked in. They peek out. They’re simple buildings, too. A couple of little cupolas, the church spire, and a tiny spire to its right are as ornamental as it gets. Vermont is austere. It’s unromantic. It doesn’t woo or flirt or cajole. You have to come to it and take it as it is.

Village of Stowe is a smart way to come to Lucioni. He’s well known in Vermont, where he lived in the summer and fall from 1939 until he died, and by the early ’30s big museums such as the Met and new cutting-edge places including MoMA and the Whitney showed and bought his work. I don’t think he’s much recognized or that he figures in the American canon. Modern Light might change this.

He’s an unusually good artist. Yes, he’s a Precisionist, and the exhibition places him in the milieu of Sheeler and Hopper. Lucioni’s rare, too, since he’s an immigrant. He’s from a town north of Milan, in the foothills of the Swiss Alps, and came here with his coppersmith father and family in 1910. Starting in the ’20s, he went back to Lombardy off and on, and drew, he admitted, from Mantegna, Raphael, and Piero della Francesca. He absorbed their forms, color, and line by instinct.

Lucioni is a Regionalist like John Steuart Curry, Thomas Hart Benton, Marsden Hartley in his Maine years, and Grandma Moses and Norman Rockwell, though Lucioni might dispute a link to Moses and Rockwell. It’s a surprise to see an Italian immigrant do this, especially since Italy has so weak a landscape tradition, but Lucioni, along with John Marin, revived the Hudson River School tradition. This anchor American aesthetic took a generation-long snooze after Inness and Homer died. Lucioni’s Vermont views, pristine and placid as they are, gave it a shake.

And Lucioni’s gay and, mostly between them and the bedpost, part of the circle of Paul Cadmus and Jared French. Lucioni’s portraits of both men are drop-dead good.

So Modern Light is a happening show. The art’s a revelation, I suspect even to Vermonters, and it’s presented with the Shelburne Museum’s trademark class and quiet confidence. It’s not big — 50 paintings and a set of etchings — so it’s succinct, too. I loved it.

Lucioni was a savant artist and a high-stepper. At 15, he was studying art at Cooper Union, at 19 at the National Academy of Design, and before long at Laurelton Hall, the home of the Tiffany Foundation’s art colony. There, John Sloan, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and Childe Hassam stewarded his talent. By the late ’20s, Lucioni, based in New York, had a dealer representing him. Vermont scenes such as Village of Stowe and his still lifes, having equal dashes of Sheeler and William Harnett, were selling well.

Lucioni had family in Barre, a tiny city in north-central Vermont, New England’s granite capital, and home to hundreds of Italian immigrants skilled in extracting stone from quarries. He liked his life in New York, but who doesn’t like a break? He visited Barre often, finding there and in the countryside his raw material. In 1931, Electra Havemeyer Webb, the sugar heiress, hired him to visit her family’s compound in Shelburne, south of Burlington on Lake Champlain, to paint a view of the main house as a wedding present for her daughter. Over the years, the Webbs commissioned dozens of works by Lucioni.

The exhibition shows a nice selection of Lucioni landscapes. He painted views like Village of Stowe but also motifs of barns and birch trees. His birch-tree paintings are pretty. White birches are everywhere in rural Vermont because they’ll grow anywhere. Wallace Nutting’s views of the Vermont and Connecticut countryside, so popular in the ’20s, made clumps of white birch along dirt roads a signifier for hardy, rugged New England. Lucioni’s birches aren’t entrepreneurial. They’re stately. They were quick sellers and seem formulaic after seeing a few of them.

Lucioni’s Vermont home was Manchester. Ye olde Arlington, where I live, is a few minutes’ drive. I’m in Manchester most days since it’s a market town. In Lucioni’s day, it was a pretty summer-resort town. When he was there, he worked. His birch paintings from the ’40s into the ’60s, many done locally, are lovely but forfeit some of their rustic charm when we learn they were painted in the local country club’s golf course. These trees are as pampered as the preppies, old and young, who still come here, summer for our perfect weather, winter to ski. No one minds the people from New York and Connecticut. The ones from New Jersey? Less said, the better.

The Weathered Barn, from 1947, and Barns on the Road, from 1948, are two Lucioni paintings of farm buildings. In the ’30s, Vermont was still an agricultural state, with around 25,000 small farms. Farmers lived harvest to harvest. When the Depression hit nationwide, Vermonters joked “what depression?” and not from nonchalance. Vermont’s economy was chronically depressed. Stowe’s population in 1930 was the same as it was in 1830.

Vermont’s barns, then, were well worn and nothing fancy. A red corn crib in Pillars of Vermont leans. There’s nothing sentimental here. The scene is still and without people, cows, or chickens. The barns are frankly there. Lucioni zooms in on them, painting each plank and each shingle so precisely that the buildings seem organic. City time, or clock time, seems to have passed them in its relentless march into the future.

This isn’t disparaging. Northern New England had a touch of hayseed chic from the days of Winslow Homer. Thomas Denenberg’s on-target essay calls the region a repository of memory, of the days when no-nonsense, tough, thrifty New Englanders got the country going. These old barns are silent witnesses. The farms they serve are hubs of tried-and-true Yankee values. Denenberg, Shelburne’s director, quotes Lincoln Kirstein’s jab at Sheeler and Hopper. Both, Kirstein said, come from “the Frigidaire school of Modernism.” Their focus, their precision, and their conception of mundane things can leave us cold. Lucioni is different. His old barns have a soul.

The barns and birches are still lifes disguised as landscapes. He’s that attentive to specific things. Lucioni’s still lifes, such as Anachronisms, from 1930, are some of the most enigmatic things in the show. Anachronisms is a warm, autobiographical brand of Precisionism, though it might be wrong to call it a Precisionist picture. It’s got no machine aesthetic. Things are used. Geometry’s not decisive. The books in the painting are Swann’s Way, by Proust, Death in Venice, by Thomas Mann, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Norman Douglas’s randy South Wind, and the randier Satyricon, of the leather dildo, as well as a book on Mantegna. An artist’s mannequin looks like a stand-in for Lucioni. At 30 by 40 inches, it’s not life-size but close to it.

Lucioni claims he didn’t like painting portraits, though he’s good at it. The portraits in the exhibition depict family and his close gay friends. Jared French is rakish in his 1930 portrait. Paul Cadmus, painted in 1928, is demure but with boy-flapper good looks. Resting Athlete, from 1938, is a male odalisque picture. It’s full length and big. It’s got presence. When Lucioni displayed it at the Corcoran Biennial in 1939, visitors voted it the most popular painting in the show. There’s really nothing like it, at least by an American artist who, at the time he did it, was well known and successful.

Neither the exhibition nor the catalogue essay on his portraits found any beans to spill on Lucioni’s relationships. He kept his private life private. His 1941 portrait of his father is dignified and respectful. His self-portrait from 1949, direct and informal, gives the art another dimension. It confirms the artist’s presence, a good thing since Lucioni isn’t a gestural painter. His finish is like satin, with little impasto. Lucioni reproduces part of a 1938 picture of the part of northern Lombardy where he was born. He said the landscape and light of that part of Italy were similar to Vermont’s.

The catalogue, published with Rizzoli, is very good. I’m happy to know, via Denenberg’s solid essay, that the Shelburne’s board understands that good directors are scholars, too. Katie Wood Kirchhoff, the curator, looks at Lucioni in the context of his day’s contemporary art. David Brody writes on Lucioni and gay New York in the ’20s and ’30s. Alexander Nemerov writes about Lucioni and Surrealism, a movement with plenty of Italian input. Richard Saunders treats Lucioni the Vermonter. Nancie Ravenal looks at the artist’s technique. Each makes Lucioni fresh.

No exhibition can address everything, and Modern Light is far-reaching, but what about Lucioni, Rockwell, and Moses? Rockwell painted scenes of everyday life in Arlington. Grandma Moses lived two or three towns to the south. The three are Vermont painters, even though, truth be told, Moses lived in Eagle Bridge in New York, on the Vermont border. She’s about as New York as a jug of Grade A Robust pure maple syrup. Moses was discovered in the late ’30s by Otto Kallir, a New York dealer who specialized in German and Austrian Modernism. Kallir saw folk art, with its simple forms, egalitarianism, and unschooled freedom, as simpatico with Modernism if not with the modern world’s hubbub.

Moses, Rockwell, and Lucioni, and I’d add Robert Frost, who lived in Shaftsbury, immediately south of Arlington, were schooled by Vermont. When Rockwell moved to Vermont in 1937, his art became more austere and poignant. City slickers mistake his poignancy for sickly sweet sentiment. Rockwell is bittersweet, at least in his Vermont years. His narratives come from real people, whose lives aren’t grim but ascetic and reticent. Moses charms, but her world is a simple, self-sufficient, enclosed one. Lucioni’s Vermont doesn’t put on airs. It doesn’t look beyond its borders. It is what it is.