A Still Life in Green & Gold

By Director David Brashear

Luigi Lucioni was born in Malnate, Italy in 1900, and moved to the United States in 1911. He was a talented artist, and attended both Cooper Union and the National Academy of Design before receiving a painting scholarship from the Tiffany Foundation, allowing him to work with some of the most accomplished American artists of the day.

Lucioni’s development as an artist was influenced by a series of trips he made to Europe in the 1920s, where he spent time in museums learning the paintings of the great masters. His attraction to the works of the titans of the Italian Renaissance became embedded in his own artistic approach, and his work was admired early by collectors and critics.

Like other artists of his time who were not drawn to abstraction, Lucioni developed a style that was deeply realistic. He was not tied to a particular direction in terms of subjects, and produced great works that included landscapes, still lifes, and portraits. He achieved notable recognition early, when in 1932 the Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased his still life painting entitled Dahlias and Apples. Works by Lucioni have joined many other important institutional collections through the years, including those of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Brooklyn Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Cleveland Museum of Art.

Through the generosity of Muscarelle Trustee Judi Forehand Starkey and Jim Starkey, Lucioni’s 1975 painting Andante in Yellow and Green is now part of the Muscarelle’s permanent collection. It is an outstanding reflection of the artist’s body of work, incorporating his signature yellow tone, his masterful rendering of draped fabrics, his realistic depiction of fruit, and his nearly-trompe l’oeil presentation of weathered wood. Additionally, in Andante in Yellow and Green Lucioni shows off his ability to paint difficult materials, inviting the viewer to look through a green glass flask. The painting is a tour de force of precision, and one the painter might have personally regarded as a work of “super realism.”