The Artwork of the month - July 2021

The summer's warm light brings out the colours of the garden that forms the background to the female portrait in Amedeo Bocchi's painting Nel parco, set in the gardens of Villa Strohl-Fern, the artist's residence since 1915. The painter is influenced by the strong painting style of the French Fauves, the Nabis and the German Expressionists of "Die Brücke" (especially Nolde and Pechstein) in his choice of blazing, dissonant colours and in his indefinite, sketchy drafting. Softly seated on the arm of the chair, her legs elegantly crossed, the woman - Niccolina Toppi, a young model and the artist's wife - occupies the centre of the scene, characterised by dense, energetic brushstrokes, the contrasting play of light and shade and the lively dialectic of colours. The face, absorbed under the broad brim of the hat, is the most accurately detailed and "focused" pictorial piece, in the context of a synthetic drafting which, on the contrary, entrusts its expressive effectiveness to the emotional force of the colours.

The painting was exhibited for the first time at the 12th Venice Biennale in 1920 and acquired in 1953. It bears witness to Bocchi's independent research which, after a phase of social realism (1905-07) and after devoting himself to large-scale modernist decorative projects (reconstruction of the Sala d'Oro in the Castello di Torrechiara, 1910-11; Sala del Consiglio della Cassa di Risparmio di Parma, 1915-1916), he became more in tune with transalpine research, although in the Roman milieu he looked to De Carolis and Sartorio, the Secession group and the XXV artists of the Roman Campagna. The female figure, one of Bocchi's favourite themes, is here combined with the strong landscape sensitivity of the artist who, far from any sentimental and intimist approach, is interested in the researches of the expressionist avant-garde and especially in the unprejudiced and anti-naturalistic use of colour.

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