Shelburne, VT -- This summer, Shelburne Museum presents Luigi Lucioni: Modern Light, an exhibition that examines the career, influences, and techniques of American artist Luigi Lucioni. A prolific painter and printmaker, Lucioni is known today for his landscape paintings, still-life works, portraiture, and etchings. Modern Light will be the first comprehensive exhibition of the artist’s work at a major public museum. Luigi Lucioni: Modern Light will be on view at Shelburne Museum.

Dubbed Vermont’s “Painter Laureate” by Life magazine in 1937, realist painter and printmaker Luigi Lucioni (1900–1988) is best known for his scenes of the state. He often painted at the Shelburne, Vermont, home of Shelburne Museum founder Electra Havemeyer Webb, who was one of his biggest patrons. Lucioni spent winters in New York City and summers in Vermont, teaching at the Southern Vermont Arts Center. Known during his lifetime as a technically sophisticated realist who favored the play of light and shadows on weathered barns and stately trees, Lucioni contributed to the genre that art historian Bruce Robertson has termed “Yankee Modernism.” Lucioni, along with Paul Sample, Maxfield Parrish, Charles Sheeler, and Andrew Wyeth, depicted a landscape and a people, orderly yet odd, who embodied an idealized set of “American” values in an era of great social and political change.

Luigi Lucioni: Modern Light investigates the artist’s relationship to the New York art world and locates the artist’s role in American modernism. The exhibition offers an intimate view into the relationship between the artist and patron Electra Havemeyer Webb, probes understandings of the artist’s immigrant identity, and comes to a better understanding of Lucioni’s paintings and works on paper via a close examination of the artist’s materials, methods, and techniques.

Luigi Lucioni: Modern Light features more than 50 works including portraits, landscapes, and still lifes from museums, private collectors, as well as from Shelburne Museum’s extensive permanent collection. Likenesses, including Self Portrait of 1949 and My Father, provide intimate glimpses into the artist’s family life. Images like Lila Webb Wilmerding and Shelburne House illuminate Lucioni’s relationships with his Vermont patrons. Portraits of creative friends, like Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and Ethel Waters, reveal an artist who was intimately involved in avant-garde social and professional circles. Providing a different kind of insight into Lucioni’s world, the exhibition includes landscapes that effectively convey gritty working sites as well as the vast, verdant terrain of Vermont. Peaceful landscapes like Village of Stowe, Vermont function as foils for industrial scenes like A Barre Granite Shed. These compositions gain context alongside works by modernist peers like Francis Colburn, Paul Sample, Charles Sheeler, and Maxfield Parrish, among others, to probe larger cultural trends in the modern American landscape. A selection of important still lifes fill out the exhibition, inviting inquiry into the material realities of Lucioni’s everyday experience.

Born in Italy in 1900, Lucioni immigrated to the United States in 1911. After training at Cooper Union and the National Academy of Design, Lucioni was granted his first solo exhibition at the Ferargil Galleries in New York City in 1927. A friendship with patron Electra Havemeyer Webb drew the artist to Shelburne in 1930, and by 1939 he had established residence in Manchester, Vermont.

Published in collaboration with Rizzoli-Electa, the catalogue for Luigi Lucioni: Modern Light recasts the ways we consider 20th-century New England modernism and its relationship to American art writ large. With an introduction by Thomas Denenberg, John Wilmerding Director, Shelburne Museum, and five essays featuring new scholarship by David Brody, Shelburne Museum Curator Katie Wood Kirchhoff, Alexander Nemerov, Shelburne Museum Director of Conservation Nancie Ravenel, and Richard Saunders, the publication’s chapters explore themes including patronage, immigrant and queer identity, the modern regionalist landscape, ideas of nostalgia, and the artist’s materials and techniques. Together, these investigations provide a new foundation for understanding the oeuvre, cultural context, and social milieu of Luigi Lucioni. The catalogue is available for purchase online in the Museum Store. (https://shelburnemuseum.org/product-category/books/)

Date: June 25 through October 16, 2022

Hours: Tuesday–Sunday - 10:00 AM–5:00 PM

Venue:
Shelburne Museum
6000 Shelburne Road
Shelburne, VT 05482

An online exhibition and webinar (https://shelburnemuseum.org/online-exhibitions/luigi-lucioni-modern-light/) Luigi Lucioni: Modern Light are available for viewing on the museum’s website.