“There have always been bad mothers”

Two of Giovanni Segantini's most important paintings hang in the Kunsthaus Zürich collection: "The Wicked Mothers" and "The Punishment of the Lustful." These are enigmatic pictures, as their titles alone suggest. Both depict a lightless, timeless dreamscape in monochrome shades of blue, beyond reality. The female figures are as surreal as the mountain landscape in which they float.

"For me, these two paintings are the only truly Surrealist pictures my grandfather painted," says Gioconda Leykauf-Segantini. Could Giovanni Segantini (1858–1899) have become a Surrealist avant la lettre if he hadn't died so early?

These are two key works in Segantini's oeuvre. Gioconda Segantini devoted a detailed examination to them in her biography of her famous grandfather.

Women occupy a special place in Giovanni Segantini's work. He idolized women: "Woman / la Donna is our goddess, art our deity," he once noted.

He also provided the reason for this veneration of the feminine: "I always loved and respected women wherever I met them, because they have the body of the mother." But Segantini didn't stop at this reverence for childbearing. He meant more by it and saw a divine principle in the feminine: "Love, respect, and honor woman because she gives us life and gives us love," he wrote elsewhere.

Segantini repeatedly addressed motherhood as a theme in his art. His granddaughter, herself a mother of six daughters and, at 84, a grandmother long ago, has well-considered ideas on this. For many decades, she has researched her famous grandfather, attempting to shed some light on the enigmatic world of the Symbolist artist from that era over 130 years ago. She was never able to meet him personally because he died at the age of 41.

From her father, Gottardo Segantini, she inherited all the writings of Giovanni Segantini, approximately five thousand documents. Her father, the eldest son of the great painter and also an artist, was also Giovanni Segantini's biographer. She describes this collection, consisting of manuscripts from her grandfather, grandmother, and her father, which she recently donated to the Swiss Institute for Art Research (SIK), as her seventh child.

Gioconda Segantini was born and raised in 1941 in Maloja, the last place where Giovanni Segantini lived and worked, in the Segantini House. Here, her grandfather had found a home. Here, in the magical light of the landscape, he had perfected his Divisionist painting technique. And here, at 1,800 meters above sea level and closer to the sky than anywhere else, Segantini had finally added a symbolist dimension to his idyllic painting of simple peasant life.

Here in Maloja, at her grandfather's former workplace, Gioconda Segantini spends the summer months. Her refuge and study is the former house of her aunt Bianca Segantini, Giovanni Segantini's only daughter.

But what's the deal with these "bad mothers"? "There have always been 'bad mothers,'" says Gioconda Segantini in the cozy living room of the old house in Maloja, richly furnished with books and pictures. "Mothers aren't just women who became pregnant, but also women who were made pregnant," she points out. And in conversation, she asks: "What is a bad mother in those days?" Women, Gioconda Segantini explains, who didn't want to be mothers back then were condemned by society. "And these weren't just those who didn't want their unwanted child, but also those who, for whatever reason, wanted to remain single."

Segantini depicted one aspect of this problem in a painting titled "Slander" from 1884. He later painted over the work. Where a priest now ascends a wide church staircase to early mass, the original depiction depicted a heavily pregnant peasant woman descending the stairs, accompanied by a dog. At the top of the landing, three monks were depicted gossiping, slandering, and laughing about the sinful state of the girl returning from confession.

"The Church at that time did not distinguish between love pregnancies and other pregnancies," Gioconda Segantini deliberately puts it. The Church coldly abandoned women who had become pregnant unintentionally. Segantini placed his "wicked mothers" in such a icy cold, snowy landscape in the Upper Engadin. A first, monumental version from 1894 is in the Belvedere Palace in Vienna. Gioconda Segantini considers it one of the most beautiful winter landscapes ever painted.

Segantini portrayed "victimized women," she says: They are victims of society—female figures with bare breasts and long, loose hair caught in the treetops. He painted them in icy cold, while the white of the snow, in all its shades, became a keyboard of light for the artist, on which he played with virtuosity. The bitter cold is refracted in the painting's silver and gold tones in the warmth of the rising sun, suggesting hope and confidence, the granddaughter interprets the masterpiece.

One woman, suspended in the dead branches of a tree, has the head of an infant on her bare breast. From the snow on the horizon, another small child's head breaks through the icy blanket of snow. The child is connected by a kind of umbilical cord to another female figure hanging in a tree.

Segantini's idea for the painting stems from a poem he received from a friend, which left a deep impression on him. "Nirvana" by Luigi Illica revolves around the theme of denied motherhood and the punishment of mothers, who, after long suffering, are finally granted redemption in the afterlife.

The work, of which the version at the Kunsthaus Zürich is a much smaller variant, was shown in the major Segantini exhibition at the Castello Sforzesco in Milan in 1894, the year it was created. However, it was not well-received by the public there. Critics wrote of "allegorical and symbolic absurdities."

In Vienna, however, it fit perfectly into the zeitgeist of the Secession, which was turning away from academic art. There, it was immediately purchased by the Kunsthistorisches Museum. Gustav Klimt's scandalous paintings of the eroticized feminine, as well as Sigmund Freud's dream analysis and Gustav Mahler's progressive tonality, prepared people in Vienna for paintings like this.

It has been claimed on several occasions that Segantini suffered from feelings of guilt because he blamed himself for his mother's early death. "By giving birth to my mother, I caused a weakness that took her away five years later." Giovanni Segantini's memory was not objective enough. He was not to blame for his mother's poor health, says Gioconda Segantini. She naturally had a rather weak constitution. The birth of her first son, who later died in a fire, had already caused her health problems.

However, based on these and other notes by Segantini, Karl Abraham undertook a psychoanalytic attempt to interpret the artist and his work in 1911. His statements about Segantini's childhood and his art were long controversial among scholars.

"Would my grandfather ever have lain down on the couch for psychoanalysis? Hardly," says Gioconda Segantini. Abraham didn't know Segantini, never spoke to him, never saw his mountains, their beauty and solitude. Accordingly, his approach was subjective and preconceived.

Abraham also denigrated his father. He was a traveling merchant, barely able to support the family, and suddenly found himself with a half-orphan. The idea that he ran away and traveled to America has now been disproven. He died impoverished after trying his hand at street music in Milan, never seeing his son again. He had left little Giovanni in the care of his daughter Irene from a previous marriage. She, however, was not exactly happy about the unexpected addition to the family; she considered it a burden.

Giovanni was often alone, repeatedly ran away, was placed in a reformatory, eked out a living by doing menial jobs, and drew portraits on the street for five lire, later drawing corpses at Milan's Ospedale Maggiore on behalf of the hospital. He was illiterate and stateless, as his half-sister, out of resentment, had ordered the revocation of Giovanni's Austrian citizenship. An Italian nation state did not yet exist at that time. It was the time of the Italian Wars of Independence against the Austrian Empire. Giovanni Segantini's childhood was sometimes reminiscent of the adventurous fate of Oliver Twist.

As a young man, Segantini had finally established himself in Milan with commissioned works, mostly still lifes. He also painted smaller panels for furniture, for example for Carlo Bugatti, the designer of extravagant furniture, who was two years his senior. When he met his brother's sister, Luigia Pierina, known as Bice – a sheltered 17-year-old girl with blond braids and blue eyes – it was love at first sight. And this love was mutual. Bice had already seen her brother's friend, who was talked about in the city as a young talent, at home a few times. She became his partner and mother of four children – they were never able to marry because Segantini had no papers.

That this relationship even came about was thanks to the insightful insight of Bugatti's mother. Giovanni was undocumented and penniless. Bice, however, came from a respected artistic family whose members were frequented by Milan's cultural elite. His father, Carlo Giovanni Bugatti, was an architect and sculptor. His son, Carlo, Bice's brother, later had two sons, Rembrandt and Ettore. One would achieve fame as an animal sculptor, the other as a brilliant automobile designer.

Bice and Segantini, these two young people, "wanted to move in together without being married. That was virtually unthinkable at the time," says Gioconda Segantini. Bice's father had just died, so it was up to Mother Bugatti to give her blessing to this love affair. "She did it courageously and wholeheartedly, for which I am very grateful, because I had truly wonderful grandparents," says the granddaughter.

With the industrial revolution and increasing emancipation, a new type of woman emerged. And Segantini had far more trouble with this than with the involuntary, "bad" mothers. "Women who only wanted pleasure but no children—that was unfeasible for Segantini," says Gioconda Segantini. And her grandfather noted: "Our current bourgeois society unfortunately only produces women with sick nerves, who are more cocottes than good mothers and faithful companions to their husbands."

This perspective was reflected in the painting entitled "Punishment of the Voluptuous." A first version from 1891 now hangs in Liverpool, where it was exhibited in 1893 and enthusiastically received—probably influenced by the Symbolist Pre-Raphaelites popular in England at the time. It depicts two female figures floating horizontally in an Upper Engadine winter landscape.

Although Segantini lived far from the world in the Swiss mountains, he used his own unique means to contribute to the discourse surrounding the new woman of the fin de siècle. The debate revolved around femmes fatales and Salomes in art and society at a time when suffragettes were beginning to fight for women's suffrage.

The subject never left Segantini. After a few years, in 1896, he returned to the subject of the "Lascivious Ones." The result was the surrealist-looking painting in shades of blue that now hangs in the Kunsthaus Zurich as a counterpart to the later, also blue-toned version of the "Wicked Mothers."

Gioconda Segantini displays a facsimile print of "The Voluptuous." It hangs in the Chiesa bianca, the white church, right next to her home in Maloja. It was here that her grandfather was laid to rest after his untimely death. And it is here that his granddaughter now regularly organizes small exhibitions.

Segantini painted the subject matter completely anew. The trees in this picture are now pitch-black. And the mountain backdrop no longer evokes the Upper Engadine, but rather Far Eastern landscapes. The dream visions of Max Ernst are echoed here.

"This figure here is still recognizable as a woman," says Gioconda Segantini of one of the three female figures hovering eerily in the cold moonlight. "But this figure in the background is no longer a woman, but a being of a different nature," she says. Here, Giovanni Segantini has gone far beyond anything he has created before.

Segantini's view of women seems conservative today. It was characterized by his love for his mother and especially for his companion. For him, love consisted of "respect and kindness," as he himself wrote: a form of love that was more lasting "than that born solely from the physical desire for beauty."

Gioconda Segantini considers her grandfather's attitude to be downright modern, as she writes in her biography. He once noted: "I love women as faithful and spiritual companions to men. Man needs a second soul that understands his own, that defines his ideals, that guides him on the path of honor and duty."

Segantini himself wrote that Bice gave his paintings a spiritual dimension. "Bice painted half of the pictures, leaving him the task of drawing them line by line," Gioconda Segantini recalls a passage from her grandfather's text. Bice also taught him to write. And, while he was painting, he would read philosophical texts to him.

But what kind of image did Giovanni Segantini have of himself? He considered his greatest work to be his painting "Vanity" from 1897. "Who am I?" was his big question at the time, says Gioconda Segantini. He wrote to his wife at the time that he was searching for a source that would serve as a mirror. In "Vanity," he depicted this mirror symbolically.

He painted the work as a commission for an exhibition at the Art Society in Pittsburgh—Segantini was internationally sought after during his lifetime. "The painting I sent you represents the vanity and deceitfulness that I have depicted in a virginal, modest female figure reflected naked in a spring," the artist wrote to the Art Society in America. In the spring water, in the shadow of a rock, he hid what he himself described as a "slimy monster with jellyfish eyes."

This work, too, hangs today in the Kunsthaus Zurich collection. And it poses no less of a mystery than the two blue-toned paintings with floating female figures in the same room.

It depicts a girl gazing into the clear spring water and seeing a monster without being frightened. The dragon is "not a devil, not evil," but simply something monstrous, unfamiliar, and unknown. "A question mark," as Gioconda Segantini puts it. "Two completely different things collide."

In this painting, Segantini was, as it were, looking into the mirror. What did he see in the reflection of his own self? In this, his most important painting, he is said to have attempted to answer the question of who he himself is. What he wanted to symbolically represent in "Vanity" in the form of beauty and shadow was, in his own words, "the day and night in time, the joy and pain in life."

"Segantini. Art and Love Conquer Time. A Biography," by Gioconda Segantini, Innquell-Verlag, 2021, Maloja, available at Druckkultur Späthling Ruppertsgrün 6, Weissenstadt, Germany.