Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo (1868-1907) The Living Torrent, 1895-6 Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan (Sprind gift, 1986) © Su concessione del Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali

Exhibition Preview - Radical Light, Italy's Divisionist Painters 1891-1910 at the National Gallery until September 7 2008.

If you’re going to Italy this summer, the National Gallery’s new Divisionist exhibition presents a far cry from your ideal vision of olive groves basking under the Mediterranean sun. These atmospheric ‘snapshots’ hark back to a darker time in Italy’s history.

Disillusioned after the unification of Italy in 1871 failed to bring the democracy and national progress it had promised, and fearing that Italian painting was lagging behind the rest of Europe, artists were ready for change, both politically and artistically.

But rather than radicalise art, a group of avant-garde northern Italians attempted to restore the order and continuity to art that had been destroyed by the Impressionists, hence why the Divisionists are also known as the Neo-Impressionists.

Luigi Russolo (1885-1947), Lightning, 1909-10. © Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, Rome. Photo Alessandro Vasari

This was achieved through a move to the country and what the artist Giovanni Segantini called the “investigation of colour in light." However, even though the Divisionists may have escaped the bleak cities of Milan and Turin, it seems the darkness followed them to the countryside.

Yet there is the light of hope in every one of their paintings. Applying the theories of optical science, the Divisionists separated colours into individual dots and strokes, which appear to blend at a distance, introducing a more colour-conscious form of Pointillism.

Alternatively, dots of contrasting pigments were applied to create vast differences between light and dark from a distance. The National Gallery has good reason to name its exhibition “Radical Light”.

© Su concessione del Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali

(Above) Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo (1868-1907), The Living Torrent, 1895-6. Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan (Sprind gift, 1986).

Displaying over 50 works by Italy’s Divisionist painters between 1891 and 1910, this is the largest show of its kind to be held in the UK, and one of the first outside Italy to examine this vital movement.

The evolution of Divisonism is laid out in its entirety across the gallery’s walls, from its early beginnings to the formation of Italian Futurism, which emerged from this earlier artistic and political movement.

On the political front, Divisionists such as Giovanni Segantini, Angelo Morbelli and Emilio Longoni adopted Socialist ideas and strove for 'an art not for art’s sake but humanity’s sake'.

Vittore Grubicy de Dragon (1851-1920) Morning, 1894-1911. Galleria d'Arte Moderna, Milano (Gam 1718). © Comune di Milano. All rights reserved

Such artists escaped to the countryside, but they continued to champion the rights of the oppressed. Pellizza’s The Living Torrent (1895-60) depicts the unstoppable progress of the proletariat in Volpedo, marching towards the light of social justice. Nearby, Morbelli returned to Piedmont, where he painted oppressed women rice workers in For Forty cents! (1893-5).

The Divisionists might not have achieved enough cohesion to spread internationally, but the plurality of their vision is what makes this movement so distinctive.