Filippo de Pisis

This is the first solo exhibition devoted to the Italian painter and writer Filippo de Pisis to be presented in Spain, where his work has been seen only in group exhibitions such as Italian Art at the MNCARS or Magic Realism at the IVAM. This is also the first time that an exhibition devoted to this artist is to be presented in Austria. Eighty paintings and twenty-five drawings will be shown, covering the various aspects of De Pisis’s prolific output. A catalogue is published to accompany the exhibition, illustrated with reproductions of the works exhibited and containing texts by Claudia Gian Ferrari, Peter Weiermair, Luciano Caramel and Marga Paz, as well as an anthology of texts by Filippo de Pisis himself. Filippo de Pisis (Ferrara, 1896 – Milan, 1956) was a painter, writer and poet. Although literature was his first interest, throughout his life that interest was combined with an intense devotion to painting and drawing. He himself said that he was “a modest painter, yes, but primarily a poet”. His childhood education was fundamentally classical, but he showed an early interest in the avant-garde movements that were emerging in Europe, and in 1916 he began making collages in which he showed his interest in objects and the construction of space within the picture. These collages, made under the influence of Cubism and Futurism, reveal a very personal way of arranging the pieces that are cut and glued on the surface. But his attachment to the humanistic tradition led him to abandon the practice of collage and he never went back to it, although he had “internalised” its system of construction. Italian art of 1914 to 1920—especially the work of artists such as De Chirico, Carrà, Sironi, Severini, Soffici and Morandi, among others—responded to the crisis of culture and history brought about by the First World War with a return to the tradition of painting and a reconsideration of artists of the past—including Giotto, Masaccio and Uccello—after assimilating avant-garde theories about the reinterpretation of reality on the basis of a new geometrical structure and a non-symbolic consideration of objects. From the very beginning of his career De Pisis favoured an artistic eclecticism that accorded with his ideals of order and harmony, and he incorporated it in his literary work as well as in his paintings. In his plastic compositions he tackled all the traditional genres of painting—still-life, portrait, nude and landscape—achieving extraordinary compositions of light, atmospheres and colour tonalities which were free of any element of narrative or logic of time. The still-life was the genre of painting in which De Pisis most successfully developed his literary leanings, with the various objects that he used to construct a picture being like items in a story. The “metaphysical” aspects of his pictures appear in highly imaginative juxtapositions of objects which create “pure rhythms of forms in space”. In his formative years as an artist, attention has been drawn to the crucial encounter in 1915 and subsequent friendship with the two brothers Giorgio de Chirico and Alberto Savinio, who had come to Ferrara because of the war and remained there until 1918. Carlo Carrà and Ardengo Soffici were also in Ferrara during that period. They became known as the Valori Plastici group, from the name of the magazine founded by Mario Broglio in Rome in 1918, the first issue of which contained an article by De Pisis. The term “metaphysical” was first used, in meetings of the group, to define art that succeeded in combining an attachment to tradition and history with an openness to the most recondite regions of the subconscious and of mysterious, unknown elements in the surrounding reality. De Chirico wrote that the transformation of the ordinary and comfortable into sensations of anxiety and even terror was the essence of metaphysical painting. In 1917 De Pisis began to correspond with Tristan Tzara and came into contact with the Futurists. Shortly afterwards, as a student in Bologna, he met Giorgio Morandi, with whom he shared a similar way of conceiving painting through the metaphysical, symbolic atmosphere created by the particular presence of objects. In 1920 he moved to Rome and there he held his first solo exhibition, consisting of drawings and watercolours. The evocative atmospheres of metaphysical painting could already be seen in his work, coupled with an expressiveness influenced by his interest in the culture of the eighteenth century, contradictions that he gradually resolved through a sensual interpretation of metaphysics. In 1920 he also obtained a position as a secondary teacher in Rome, where he frequented artistic and literary circles and visited the museums of the city. He exhibited his work at the Teatro Nazionale and, together with De Chirico and Donghi, appeared in the third Rome Biennial in 1925. A few months later he moved to Paris, where his work became imbued with the influence of Impressionism and the work of Manet, the Romanticism of Delacroix, the Expressionism of Daumier and the modernity of Picasso. In Paris he rediscovered his old friends from Ferrara and he took part in the exhibition Les artistes italiens de Paris. Various solo exhibitions were also devoted to De Pisis and his work was selected to appear in the first (1926) and second (1929) Mostra del Novecento Italiano, organised by Margherita Sarfatti and presented in Milan. During the Second World War he returned to Italy, living in Milan and Venice, but after the war he experienced indications of hostility which led him to move back to Paris. He lived there until 1948, when the worsening of his nervous disorder led to his admission to a psychiatric hospital. The last years of his life were marked by periods of hospitalisation and recovery. Nevertheless, he continued to be very active as a painter and remained faithful to his favourite themes: figures, landscapes and still-lifes. An exhibition was organised in Florence as a tribute to him shortly before he died, and the same year the Venice Biennial included a major retrospective of his work. In addition to the numerous articles of journalism that he wrote throughout his life, many of them about art, he produced a number of outstanding literary works, including I canti de la Croara, Vaghe stelle dell’Orsa (Diario di Bologna 1916-1918), Il Signor Luigi B., Il verbo de Bodhisattva and Memorie di una scimmia.