Art: Good Green Vermonter

Luigi Lucioni has been called the most popular American painter since Gilbert Stuart. That is an exaggeration, but not a wild one. Lucioni has made outdoor Vermont his bailiwick, and no one paints it better. Working slowly and meticulously from nature, with tiny camel’s-hair brushes, he mixes weathered barns, shady elms, blue-green hills and white steeples into canvases as crisp as a good salad.

That the salad goes down well with the American middlebrow was proved once again last week by a retrospective show of Lucioni’s work in Manhattan. Visitors admired the tight, slick portraits and painstaking still lifes with which Lucioni occupies his winter months, lingered longer before his summer landscapes—stage sets for perfect vacations. Like stage sets, they are actually airless and flat, lacking both the deep perspectives of Renaissance art and the sunny sparkle of the impressionists. But all the details are there, down cold, as if under glass. It takes only a little imagination for the viewer to break the glass and bring the scene to life.

Born in Italy, Lucioni came to Manhattan at ten, discovered Vermont eight years later. He worked his way through art schools, made a business success of painting while still in his 20s. A rough-hewn bachelor with pink cheeks and thick grey hair, he winters in Greenwich Village, plays and sings snatches from operas for relaxation. In Vermont he lives with two sisters, raises all his own vegetables.

People, he complains, “call my painting photographic and talk about my extraordinary eyesight—that I can see individual leaves on a tree at 100 yards. My eye isn’t any more extraordinary than anyone else’s. I know the leaves are there so I paint them there.” By dint of hard work and fine craftsmanship, Lucioni adds up enough leaves to make convincing trees, and enough trees, barns, hills, etc., to give an accurate idea of what Vermont is like. “There,” a lot of summer tourists can sigh, “is my own, my native land.”