Spring in the Alps

Spring in the Alps (1897) belongs to Segantini's final years in Maloja and represents his mature synthesis of realist observation and philosophical symbolism. Spring in the high Alps was a dramatic event: the snow's retreat, the reappearance of grass, the return of animals to the high pastures, the transformation of the light from winter's cold blues to the warm golds of spring — all of this carried for Segantini the weight of cosmic renewal. His reading of Vedic philosophy had given him a framework in which seasonal cycles were moral and spiritual cycles as well. The Getty Museum acquired this work as a signal example of Segantini's late style, and its presence in the Los Angeles collection has made it one of his most widely reproduced paintings in the English-speaking world. By 1897 Segantini had only two years to live — he died at forty-one of appendicitis on Monte Scerscen while working on his Alpine Triptych — and the works of this period carry a particular intensity. Spring in the Alps was exhibited internationally and praised by critics in Vienna, Munich, and London as evidence of a unique synthesis between northern Divisionism and Italian Symbolism.

Spring in the Alps demands divisionist treatment of two different light conditions simultaneously: snow that has not yet melted and new grass that has appeared through it. Segantini renders the interaction of cold white and warm green through carefully modulated colour strokes that capture the particular quality of high-altitude spring light — intensely bright, shadowless, with extraordinary colour saturation.