Like Ferruccio Scattola (Venice, 1873 – Rome, 1950) and, even more avowedly, Teodoro Wolf Ferrari (Venice, 1878 – San Zenone degli Ezzelini, 1945), Guido Marussig also moved at ease between the Biennale, where he made his debut at the age of twenty, in 1906, and Ca' Pesaro, where he exhibited as early as 1908, even graphically designing its first manifesto.

He trained in a Mitteleuropean climate, between Trieste and Venice, where he attended the Accademia with Ettore Tito and Augusto Sezanne. His poetics was already well defined by 1907, when he was invited to exhibit Weeping Willow in the Biennale hall, dedicated to the Art of the Dream. This work, much appreciated by his contemporaries, was recently re-proposed to the public on the occasion of the exhibition dedicated to Klimt and Italian Art at the Mart in Rovereto.

In the wake of Mario de Maria (Bologna, 1852 – 1924) and parallel to Gennaro Favai (Venice, 1879 - 1958), Marussig assimilated the culture of German Symbolism, softened in a decorative key. He is distinguished by compositions of exquisite execution, devoid of human figures, built on a close-up viewpoint and characterised by an extremely modern cut. His landscapes, very selected (and very rare), re-propose the chromatic cascades of Klimt's secessionism, to which is mixed with highly original formula certain Nabis synthetism, borrow from the painter's proximity to the Ca' Pesaro group, to Gino Rossi (Venice, 1884 – Treviso, 1947) and Umberto Moggioli (Trento, 1886 – Rome, 1919) in particular.

 

The Venetian season ended with the first maturity of the artist. He moved to Milan in 1916, successfully inserted himself into the reality of the city by taking part in some important exhibitions. In particular, in 1920, he was present with 18 works at the exhibition that Galleria Pesaro dedicated to four great Venetian masters of the 20th century: in addition to him, Vettore Zanetti Zilla, Benvenuto Disertori and Vittorio Zecchin. The catalog, edited by Vittorio Pica, also mentions Alba di luna sull'estuario (Moonrise on the estuary), a work of rarefied elegance, that reproposes years later a 1907 composition entitled Sunset (fig. 1). With respect to the declared symbolism of Nordic imprint that innervates the older painting, in the work of 1920 relevant is the discovery of the autonomous value of chromatic material, declined in an exquisitely decorative key, which goes hand in hand with a marked two-dimensional stylization that looks to the Viennese Secession and that will be found again, shortly thereafter, in terms of almost identical formal synthesis in the Traghetto di Santa Maria del Giglio (fig. 2), presented in 1924 at the 14th edition of the Venice Biennale.

 

After his experience in Fiume alongside Gabriele D'Annunzio (who commissioned him to decorate the Vittoriale), Marussig was engaged in painting as well as in the decorative arts and architecture, areas in which he was fully involved in the climate of the Italian Novecento.