Tsekkin, Vittorio

Italian artist Vittorio Tsekkin was born on May 21, 1878 in Murano (Italy), located on the large island of the Venetian lagoon. His father, Luigi Tsekkin, was a master in the manufacture of glass products ^[1] . The family believed that Vittorio would follow in his father's footsteps, but this craft did not guarantee financial stability due to the crisis in the production of Murano glass and had to be abandoned.

Vittorio Tsekkin graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice . Despite the fact that the end of the 19th century was on, the Academy preserved centuries-old traditions rooted in Venetian painting. Since 1897, Tsekkin attended the course of the landscape painter and marine painter Guglielmo Chardi (Guglielmo Ciardi, 1842-1917), two years later he moved to the workshop of the landscape painter Augusto Sezanne (Augusto Sezanne, 1836-1935) ^[2] . Cezanne himself simultaneously engaged in arts and crafts, was an engraver and a ceramist. Since 1899, Vittorio studied with Cezanne, but in 1901, possibly because of the difficult situation of his family, he left the Academy without appearing for exams. He never received a Academy diploma.

After that, Tsekkin worked for several months as a clerk in one of the institutions of Murano, then - in one of the glass workshops on the island. During these years, Vittorio did not forget about painting. Thanks to the traditional Venice Biennale, many young artists at the turn of the century were able to get acquainted with the symbolist stylistic features of their European colleagues, the Vienna Secession, pointillism and others. The landmarks for Tsekkin's work were the work of the Dutch symbolist Jan Theodorus Toorop (Johannes Theodorus Toorop, 1858-1928) and the Austrian founder of Art Nouveau, Gustav Klimt (Gustav Klimt, 1862-1918), whose paintings Vittorio saw at the Biennale in 1910.

Tsekkin decided to look for his niche between painting and industrial design, with which he worked in Murano. In 1909, he became part of a group of artists who were influenced by the ideas of Klimt and Torop. The artists joined forces and began to exhibit in the palace of Ca 'Pesaro in 1908. There, from 1902, the Gallery of Modern Art was opened. In 1909, Vittorio showed his paintings “Visions” (Visioni), “Virgin of Fire” (Le vergini del fuoco), “Impression” (Impressione), “Dragonflies” (Libellule), “Silence” (Silenzio) at the summer and autumn exhibitions in Ca 'Pesaro. The artist began to take part in the Biennale annually. The organizers of the Biennale were skeptical of modern art Nouveau, however, they organized the Youth Hall, where representatives of various artistic movements began to exhibit.

In 1913, Tsekkin participated in the first exhibition of the Roman Secession , exhibited in the capital in 1914 and 1915. Back in 1913, he received an order for a series of decorative panels on canvas for the Terminus Hotel. He wrote a series of paintings based on fairy tales “A Thousand and One Nights” (Le Mlle e una note), which became the artist’s most famous work. The panels were located on a plot of about thirty meters in length and were in the narrow hall of the hotel restaurant. Over time, the restaurant underwent repairs and restructuring of the interior, so the panels were dismantled. They were divided into eleven paintings, which were distributed in different collections. This work became for Tsekkin the pinnacle of painting. After that, the artist felt the "crisis of the genre."

In 1914, Vittorio fell into the category of “rejected artists” and with the rest began to exhibit his paintings in a tent camp on the bay. In the same year, he and the Venetian artist Theodore Wolf Ferrari presented at the Biennale several glasses made at a glass factory in Bavorie ^[3] .

In 1920, the artist married. From 1921 to 1925, he became the artistic director of Vetri Soffiati Muranesi Cappellin Venini & C. At this time, Vittorio, inspired by the picturesque style of 16th-century Venetian artists, creates glassware with delicate colors. His vases were the first examples of work in Murano glass ^[4] . The products created by Tsekkin during these years were shown at the Biennale of Decorative and Applied Arts in Monza in 1923, 1925 and 1927, and in 1926 at the World Expo in Paris . In the first half of the 1920s, he continued to work in the fields of painting, industrial design and the creation of mosaics.

The 1930s he devoted to the creation of exquisite glass products ^[5] . At the end of 1926, Kappelin & Venini closed the factory, but Tsekkin continued to cooperate with glass enterprises - Ferro-Toso (1930), l'AVEM (1932-1933), Salir (1932-1938), Barovier Seguso Ferro (1933 —1934) and Fratelli Toso (1938).

In the thirties and the last decade of his life, he worked as a teacher at the School of Glass Industry in Murano, the glass school Abate Zanetti, wrote two training brochures, worked at the Vendramin Corner vocational school, teaching students to work with tapestries and embroidery ^[6] In the last years of his life, Tsekkin also wrote a series of still lifes.The artist died in 1947.

• Murano glass

• Voce relativa in: Nuova Enciclopedia dell'Arte, Garzanti, Milano 1986.

• ZHZL (VITTORIO TSEKKIN. MURANIAN GLASS AND CLIMT.)
• Italian artist Vittorio Tsekkin
• Vittorio zecchin