GLR November-December 2022

ART

Portraits with an Electric Charge

I AM NOT a great believer in fate. Still, it has a way of surprising one. Over ten years ago, while reading the letters between artist Romaine Brooks and writer Natalie Barney in Tulsa, Okla homa, I saw a letter from Brooks mention ing that she wanted to see an exhibition of works by Italian-American artist Luigi Lu ciano. I had never heard of him, so I jotted down his name on an index card and promptly forgot about him. So when I heard there was a new book on Lucioni— David Brody’s Luigi Lucioni: Modern Light —I jumped at the chance to explore his work at last. Lucioni’s landscapes are deceptively simple, but he’s no Eric Sloan, Andrew Wyeth, or even Grant Wood. Born in 1900 in Malnate, Italy, his family emigrated to America when Luigi was ten. He attended Cooper Union and later studied at the National Academy of Design. He returned to Europe repeatedly from 1925 through the 1930s to study art. Throughout the 1920s, he maintained a home in New York, in lower Man hattan. His work was already in the collections of several prominent museums when he caught the eye of heiress Electa Havemeyer Webb and her daughter Alice, who became his devoted pa trons. Alice later married the American art his torian John Wilmerding, who supported Lucioni through Havemeyer’s Shelburne Museum in Vermont. Lucioni may have modestly called himself a New England painter, but he was so much more than that. His queer network included the New York circle that revolved around the trio of Mon roe Wheeler, who served in various influential positions at the Museum of Modern Art; novelist Glenway Wescott; and photographer George Platt Lynes. His intimates included the very talented “PaJaMa” group comprised of Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and Margaret French. Lincoln Cassandra Langer, a writer based in New York City, is the author of Romaine Brooks: A Life (Wisconsin). Lucioni enjoys a reputation as the “painter Laureate” of Ver mont, and on the face of it, he looks like many American scene painters of the 1920s and ’30s. Picture a very different world from the one we find ourselves in now, a rural America before the Civil War. Imagine pristine mountains, upland pastures, aging barns, silos, and an occasional church spire. Communities are tidy, neat, predictable, and se cure in their routines.

Kirstein was married to Cadmus’ sister Fi delma and supportive of their performative endeavors. This troika staged and pho tographed evocative nude and seminude tableaus that appear frozen in time. An unidentified photograph shows Nancy Walter, Luigi Lucioni, Fidelma Cad mus, and Paul Cadmus acting in “Skit” at the Tiffany Foundation in Oyster Bay, NY, in 1926. Lucioni never displayed his sexu ality publicly, but his portrait of Jerry (French) was given to Paul Cadmus (they were lovers) and speaks to the intimacy among these three artists. Kirstein admired

C ASSANDRA L ANGER

LUIGI LUCIONI Modern Light Shelburne Museum, Vermont June 25–October 16, 2022 LUIGI LUCIONI Modern Light by David Brody Rizzoli Electa. 160 pages, $55.

and promoted Lucioni’s cool, detached magic realism because his allegories stepped out of the closet. His landscapes are sub tle, unlike his gay portraits, reminiscent of Romaine Brooks’ Spring (a lesbian parable painted 1910-13). The associations that punctuate these visual images also inform the subtle works of Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O’Keeffe, and

Luigi Lucioni. A Portrait of Bob , 1936. Gene Shannon collection.

November–December 2022

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