Laura Gascoigne

Defying definition

Laura Gascoigne on Divisionism

issue 17 May 2008

In 1888, visitors to Earls Court were treated to the novel sight of an exhibition of avant-garde art from Italy. The show was mounted by the Milanese Vittore Grubicy de Dragon, the art-dealer son of an impoverished Hungarian baron. A follower of the Paris art scene and a convert to the optical theories of Ogden Rood, Grubicy was training up a stable of young artists — most of them graduates of the Brera Academy — in the principles of optical mixing pioneered by the Pointillists. He dubbed his modern art movement Divisionism — not a school, he said, but ‘a technical means for reproducing, with colouring materials, the luminous vibrations which go to make up light’.

Grubicy’s London venture was a flop; the show lost money and opened a permanent rift between him and his brother and business partner Alberto.

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