Susan Vreeland
Ritratti d'Artista

What does Art represent for those who practice it and for those who contemplate it? Just another job and a pastime among many, or an alternative instrument of human existence and an emotional path that can lead to contemplation of oneself and the world? The answer comes from "Ritratti d'Artista" by Susan Vreeland, an author of excellent "fantasies" about artist biographies such as La Vita Moderna (about the impressionist Auguste Renoir) and the famous Passione di Artemisia. Using a temporal diptych between past and present, Vreeland offers a rich sequence of stories and events ranging from the vital experiences of figures like Manet, Monet, Van Gogh, and Cezanne to stories of individuals, ordinary subjects who decide to abdicate the dull monotony of their contemporary and post-contemporary lives and embrace the mystical and ascetic effluvium of creativity made a human mindset.

Vreeland's approach towards the individual protagonists of the stories manages, despite temporal, historical, and cultural divides, to unify the different episodes into a grand unicum of fantasy, romanticism, and alienation from the vacuous daily life. If the artist is endowed with the ability to transform every moment of life into art and magic, even death, pain, farewell, and estrangement, the consumerist, frantic man, perhaps ignorant and anti-intellectual, builds a personal universe, parallel, full of joyous innocence, small and great enthusiasm, magnificent simplicity. It is not only the painter, the sculptor, the aesthete, the fluttering dandy, the bohemian with the beret, the French mustache, and the inevitable absinthe glass sipped in Montmartre cafes who produce art, discover the unreal that materializes, and paint the same on a foreign canvas: Vreeland suggests to the reader how anyone can make their life a small heritage of creative ecstasy, a roaring vortex of colors, shapes, atmospheres, spaces, volumes, lines, perspectives traced and developed even by the sensuality of bodies and the immensity of the perennial rational/irrational contrast.

The narrative richness of "Ritratti d'Artista" initially gets lost in the deep multicolored world of Impressionism; here Vreeland outlines small yet intense sketches of the "refusés" intent on oscillating between women, sex, and art, mixing the biography of the controversial bohemian aesthete with passion and romantic effusion and the naturalist realism of flowering landscapes and soft-focus panoramas. However, the author's work is not primarily focused on the various Monet and Van Gogh, but on the people, the individuals with whom they interact, meet, exchange opinions and reciprocate feelings: the portraits of the artist that are outlined encompass everything their works manage to encompass. Thus, we have a Suzanne Manet, resentful towards the various lovers possessed by her husband who has just succumbed to syphilis, deciding to "alternatively" christen the masterpieces of the beloved, the diary of a woman, the wife of a ruined impressionist art dealer, forced to share the pain of Claude Monet's woman, who died after excruciating suffering, or the portrait that the great landscape painter Renoir makes for little Mimi. Here, then, art transforms into the lifeblood of the vacuous, poor, null, destroyed, and ignorant man determined to redeem his nullity with the vision of the works and even with an attitude of "servitude", abandonment to beauty, the eternal, the extraordinary, the miraculous, the unreal: two shepherd friends from the Tuscan countryside bartering pecorino with admiration for the Sistine Chapel, the little-loved spouse willing to pose nude for an audience of students, the separated mother convinced by her son to impersonate the female character of Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by pointillist Seurat in a grand theatrical show. Stories, vignettes, little tales imbued with a potent common denominator capable of lifting the head of one who seems forever bent and subdued.

With "Ritratti d'Artista" Susan Vreeland confirms her enormous talent in transforming art into literature, even creating timelines apparently unbridgeable yet capable of extraordinary blending, that of the colors, forms, and lines of the great characters who have inspired entire generations of men, artists, and artist-men, namely us.