Glarnealpen

According to the inscription by the artist’s wife on the back of the canvas, the painting was executed in 1913. It depicts the imposing Glarus Alps on a sunny day. Ten years earlier the De Grada family had moved to north-east Switzerland near Zurich. The young De Grada had attended the Academies of Dresden and Karlsruhe and come into contact with the Secessionist and Symbolist movements, and the work of Ferdinand Jodler in particular. Thanks to these models he had developed a spare descriptive style, using thick brushstrokes and very bright colours. This work can be identified as Glarnealpen, a canvas exhibited in November 1913 in the artist’s first solo show mounted by the Galerie Neupert in Zurich and it is a fine example of those “snow” works which, as his wife Magda recalls, were particularly admired by Swiss collectors. As is evident also from the other works in the Collection ― Pond (1949), Snow or Snowfall (1950) and Landscape (1953) ― Raffaele De Grada represents a link between three different artistic realities: the 19th-century tradition and the 20th-century Mitteleuropean culture and that of central Italy. When the artist returned to Italy after World War I he lived first in Florence, where he met Ardengo Soffici and Ottone Rosai, and later moved to Milan. Mario Sironi and Achille Funi introduced him to the artistic circle of Margherita Sarfatti and the Novecento Italiano. Though he participated in the group’s exhibitions he did not wholly embrace its poetics and felt closer to Arturo Tosi and Aldo Carpi, with whom he shared a love of nature and an affinity with Lombard Naturalism.