Art The painter of the Grisons mountains Giovanni Segantini died 125 years ago

125 years ago, the painter Giovanni Segantini died of peritonitis at the age of just 41 on September 28, 1899 on the Schafberg in the Engadin. To mark the 125th anniversary of his death, the Segantini Museum is organizing two events.

"The misfortune came like a bolt of lightning. Segantini died at midnight on Thursday in the hut on the Schafberg, where he was working on the large painting for Paris, Sunset in the Engadin." Segantini's partner Bice Segantini sent these words by telegram to the mayor of Arco, the village where Giovanni Segantini was born, which at the time belonged to Tyrol.

According to a biography from the early 1900s, the sick Segantini asked to put his bed next to the window in the hut above Pontresina in order to admire a mountain range that he wanted to finish painting.

An orphan from an early age

Segantini was confronted with death at an early age. A few months after his birth, his brother died in a fire. When he was seven, his mother died and only a year later his father died. Death is a present theme in the painter's life and work, for example in the painting "Dead Deer".

"Segantini shows here the death of the creature in its terrifying inevitability," the artistic director of the Segantini Museum in St. Moritz, Mirella Carbone, told the Keystone-SDA news agency. In many of his other paintings, he addresses the consequences of death, such as the agonizing pain of the survivors. She thinks of pictures such as "The Empty Cradle" or "The Orphans" or "Back Home", said Carbone.

Reverence for nature as a legacy

Although 125 years have passed since his death, according to Carbone, Segantini still inspires people today. Pianist Ludovico Einaudi, for example, was inspired by the "Triptych of the Alps" for his composition "Divenire". Segantini's legacy for our time is his reverence for nature.

In a lecture at the Segantini Museum on Saturday evening (28 September), the artistic director of the museum will show how the painter "more or less consciously wanted to express traumas, fears, longings and obsessions in his artistic work, and perhaps even work through them." One of these is certainly death. On Monday, September 30, there will be a guided hike from Pontresina to the hut on the Schafberg.

SDA