Noon

In January 1929 six young painters who had all come out of Felice Casorati's studio in Turin showed together for the first time, at the Galleria Guglielmi. They became known as the Six Painters of Turin, and Gigi Chessa, then 30, was one of them. They set themselves against the Novecento, the movement led from Milan by the critic Margherita Sarfatti, whose painters they found falsely classical and closed to foreign art. The six looked to modern French painting instead, to Cézanne and the Post-Impressionists who had caught Chessa's eye at the Venice Biennale of 1922. Noon dates from that same year, 1929. Its Italian title carries a second word in brackets, Meriggio, the old Italian name for the heat of the early afternoon, when work stops and the countryside goes still.