The cosmopolitan character of the artist and his incessant traveling through Europe in the XNUMXs and XNUMXs places de Pisis in a modern and current light, that of an intellectual without borders who, in a period of strengthening of nations and international crisis, chooses main capitals as venues more proper to the personal expressive declination.
The exhibition intends to expand the discourse started with the historic exhibition curated at the time by Giuliano Briganti and focused on the years in Paris (1925-1939). The Parisian years, fertile in pictorial discoveries and maturations, are here preceded by the years in Rome (1920-1924), in which painting is revealed to the artist as the most appropriate medium; they are interspersed with two stays in London (1935 and 1938), important for the purposes of clarifying the sign and fine-tuning a personal chromatic palette; they are followed by the period of transfer to Milan (1940-1943) and finally the prelude to the great work in Venice (1943-1949), the happiest moment of Depisisian painting.
Long stays in European capitals and in the main Italian cities of art are interspersed with the usual summer breaks in Cortina d'Ampezzo, where de Pisis seeks an authentic relationship with the natural elements and the local people. The artist has been a tireless traveller, from an early age: in the guise of a naturalist botanist and butterfly collector he made long wanderings around his native Ferrara, moving both along the Adriatic and towards the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines.
Ferrara is the City of a Hundred Wonders, an urban reality experienced in youthful metaphysical enchantment and filtered mainly through literature, the artist's dominant vein until the mid-XNUMXs. However it remains in Depisis' pictorial imagination almost like a model, exported to every different European context, in a sort of aura that permeates his gaze on things.
Furthermore, each period of stay in a city constitutes for de Pisis an opportunity for discussion with the museum – the great museums of European capitals – where he rediscovers international masters, from Chardin to Lorrain under the lights of Corot, reviews Italian painting, the Venetian school from Giorgione to Titian to Tintoretto. The European capitals allow de Pisis a new adventure in the city, in its teeming and in the intrinsic vitality of the parks, of the corners chosen by the painter en plein air, in a direct relationship with the varied humanity with which the artist is in contact time. The impressionist lesson is therefore followed to the letter by the painter, although the favorite corners and glimpses, the interiors of the churches, bring back a rather different vision from the nineteenth-century aerial perspectives.
In the painter's urban views, the ambiguity often shines through, even in the sumptuous vitality of the painting, of a melancholy vein: the quick and synthetic strokes, the smudged paint, the gaunt simplicity of some compositions reveal that exuberant happiness that hides a constant existential pain .
The exhibition focuses on some works relating to periods of stay in a European city in the genres of urban landscape, portrait and male nude, still life, which constitute the painter's main areas of research, fixed themes in which he expresses his anxieties and his aristocratic detachment from the world.
From the Roman period (1920-1924) stands out the Still life with eggs (1924) from the Jesi Collection (Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan) specially restored for the occasion, a "metaphysical" work that reveals the young artist's contacts with some contemporary models , including Giorgio Morandi known in Bologna during his university years.
Among the masterpieces of the exhibition, in the Parisian period, are the urban landscapes such as the tormented Quai de la Tournelle (1938) or the limpid French Sailor (1930) a portrait of a young man painted in that atelier jokingly called his "grenier", which metaphorically alludes to the instability of existence, between real or just imagined departures and arrivals.
The diptych of The Street of London and Newton's House (1935) belongs to the London period, emblematic images of the depressed and gloomy atmosphere that the artist perceived in the London sky.
For the first time, the donation that the artist made in 1941 to the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome is also partially reconstructed, a nucleus of twelve paintings that were to represent his art, with emblematic works of the ongoing research, between urban landscapes, still lifes and portraits.
The exhibition is divided into five main sections:
• The Rome years (1920-1924)
• Paris (1925-1939)
• London (1933, 1935, 1938)
• Milan (1940-1943)
• Venice (1943-1949)
Curated by Paolo Campiglio, on the initiative of the Magnani Rocca Foundation chaired by Giancarlo Forestieri, in collaboration with the Associazione per Filippo de Pisis, with the coordination of Stefano Roffi, the exhibition, entitled “Filippo de Pisis en voyage. Rome, Paris, London, Milan, Venice”, can be visited from September 13 to December 8, 2013 of Villa of Masterpieces of Mamiano di Traversetolo (Parma), the refined residence, now the headquarters of the Magnani Rocca Foundation, which belonged to Luigi Magnani, a friend and collector of de Pisis.
The exhibition is accompanied by a rich catalog which, in addition to reproducing the works on display, is conceived as a tool for historical-artistic analysis of the painter's work in the light of the documentary sources (published and unpublished) that emerged from the research. It includes essays by the curator, by Elisa Camesasca, by Marilena Pasquali, by Stefano Roffi, by Andrea Sisti, by Maddalena Tibertelli de Pisis.
Info: Magnani Rocca Foundation
