American verismo

American verismo describes an artistic style of American literature, music, or painting influenced and inspired by artistic ideas that began in 19th-century Italian culture, movements that used motifs from everyday life and working class persons from both urban and rural situations. American composers, writers, painters, and poets have used this genre to create works that contain socio-political as well as purely aesthetic statements.

In Italy, the term “verismo” is applied to the use of everyday life and characters in artistic works. It was introduced into opera in the early 1900s in reaction to contemporary conventions that were regarded as artificial and untruthful.

Generally, “verismo” (meaning "realism," from Italian vero, meaning "true") refers to a 19th-century Italian painting style. This style was practiced most characteristically by the "I Macchiaioli" a group of Tuscan painters, who were forerunners of the French Impressionists. The style and its underlying social goals related to general 19th-century artistic developments that occurred in many countries, from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean, which stemmed from nationalist movements and intellectuals' responses to the effects of industrialization.

In Italy, the national origin of “verismo,” especially in literature and opera, was a profound sympathy for the disadvantaged working people, whose life, for the most part, consisted of hard labor, poverty, and oppression.

For example, the authors G. Verga, L. Capuana, D. Ciampoli, R. Fucini, M. Serao introduced the language of common people into their works and made extensive use of dialects. The Italians also created a theater that reflected everyday life, as exemplified by the comedies of G. Rovetta and G. Giacosa.

In America, Tobias Picker’s 2013 opera that opened at the San Francisco Opera was acclaimed as a “triumph of American verismo.”

Verismo opera composers often chose rural folk, poor city dwellers, and representatives of bohemianism. Early works in this genre were P. Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana( 1890) which chose rural folk, poor city dwellers, and bohemian characters.

The American painter Jerry Ross calls his style “American verismo.” Jerry Ross (painter) has been teaching a series of workshops and classes in Eugene, Oregon based on his study of the I Macchiaioli. He founded the group “Club Macchia,” a group of like-minded plein air painters working in Oregon and Washington. The group had two important exhibitions in Oregon at the Newport Art Center in Newport and the Jacobs Gallery in Eugene. The exhibition at the Jacobs Gallery in Eugene saw the distribution of their book about the group and was well attended. This was one of the last exhibitions held at the Gallery before it went out of business in 2015.

In his classes, Ross teaches the concept of Macchia as “spot or stain or dab” and distinguishes between mass, line, color, and edge macchie (the plural of macchia). Explaining the Francophile bias of American expressionism, Ross builds on the ideas of art historian Albert Boime and his book The Art of the Macchia and the Risorgimento, Representing Culture and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Italy.

This text had a huge effect on Ross who began incorporating the story of the I Macchialioli into his class materials. Ross’s own background in the radical politics of the 1960s and 1970s led to his identification with the Tuscan group, many of whom participated in the struggle for Italian socialism and national unification. In 2013, Ross wrote a "Manifesto of American Verismo," which summarized many of his ideas on the subject.

Desiring a painting style that was truly Italian and representative of their particular cultural characteristics, loose and expressive and breaking with tradition the I Macchiaioli began artistic movement. As explained by Boime, their “sketch style” and “non finito” (unfinished) look was both modern and a clean break with academic “polish,” but also the subject matter was often political as well, featuring socio-political issues such as the plight of women, workers, and farmers.

Ross makes the point that while line, mass, and color are important in every painting, for rapid plein air work one might be better off beginning with thumbnail “scribble” sketches and small two to four values studies using the biggest brush possible for the job. This “disegno” (design) becomes the blueprint for the painting and establishes the “macchia” (in the sense of the harmonious overall distribution of lights and darks). Without a strong macchia structure the work will lack “impact” (the term used by the I Macchiaioli artists) for such an imprimatur (underpainting) that becomes the basis for the final work (either through wet into wet or wet into dry approaches).

Ross points out that the most experienced plein air painters generally use this approach, sometimes called “contemporary impressionism.” Ross notes that after absorbing some of the ideas in painting brought into the light of day by the Abstract Expressionists, plein air painters need to incorporate abstraction and descriptive/expressive brushwork as well as texture techniques that give the surface a three-dimensional quality. His class “abstraction in plein air” emphasizes the idea of discovery of large abstract shapes and the importance of composition. In his approach, “there is abstraction within realism and realism within abstraction.”