Think of a still life as a self-portrait of the artist who created it: their sensibility and aspirations towards the surrounding world crystallized into an assortment of objects. Objecthood quivering with subjectivity. A strange, silent microcosm where things serve as coordinates of an emotional, personal cartography. An apple, a bottle, or a flower can turn into an affect, a sentiment, a thought.
Filippo de Pisis’s La bottiglia tragica (The tragic bottle, Gallerie d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea: Museo Filippo de Pisis, Ferrara), currently exhibited in Adriano Pedrosa’s 2024 Venice Biennale is a seemingly peaceful, joyous 1927 still life—a flowery tablecloth, a fruit bowl, a painter’s palette and a bottle of Medoc. The title, however, hints at a sinister backstory: that of the attempted robbery perpetrated by two young men, invited by the painter to pose for him in his Paris studio. The painting captures the table after the aggression; it is charged with a deeper meaning. The objects represented here—especially the “tragic” bottle of wine, the weapon used by the attackers—now look heavier. They encapsulate a memory of De Pisis’s confusion and distress.
Filippo de Pisis, Ritratto di ragazzo, 1920s, pencil and sanguine on paper, 27.4 x 20.8 cm, photography by Carlo Favero, courtesy Filippo de Pisis Estate and P420, Bologna
Luigi Filippo Tibertelli, alias Filippo de Pisis (1896–1956), was a highly versatile artist. Born into an aristocratic family in Ferrara, he led a dandyish lifestyle. He was a cosmopolitan flâneur who lived in multiple cities around Europe (Rome, Paris, London, Milan, Venice). He had an insatiable curiosity for the world: he described himself as a botanist and entomologist, but mostly as “a poet who was turning more and more into a painter.” If poetry was his initial calling, painting brought him success. Throughout his life he repeatedly turned to the same subjects, almost obsessively: still life paintings, vases with flowers, and maritime scenes, alongside portraits and drawings of male nudes.
De Pisis was initially captivated by Giorgio de Chirico’s Metaphysical Painting, with its suspended, oneiric atmospheres which deeply influenced his early still lifes and seascapes. Then came Paris, where he lived from 1925 to 1939 and began veering towards freer brushstrokes and a richer palette, evocative of the French Impressionists and the Venetian school. In 1935, the great poet Eugenio Montale likened De Pisis’s newly dynamic, fragmented style to the jittery movements of a fly (pittura a zampa di mosca). But it was only in the final period of the artist’s life, after returning to Italy at the outbreak of World War II, that he fully embraced a more impulsive, feverish pictorial approach: a mode defined by semplicità (simplicity) and brivido (thrill), in De Pisis’s own words.
“A bleeding sense of humanity,” as described by Giovanni Comisso, a lifelong friend of the painter, permeates De Pisis’s later style—perhaps his most innovative and compelling. The lines are fragmentary, more liquid, expressionistic; gaps and omissions dot the pictorial plane, like sighs or gasps. This shift intensified in 1949 when the artist was hospitalized at Villa Fiorita, a psychiatric clinic in Brugherio, near Milan, due to a nervous illness. Ominous, leaden skies begin to loom over his still lifes; the flowers become sparser and airier, their petals enveloped by portions of raw, unpainted canvas. “A light breeze takes them [the flowers] away / towards unknown heavens,” writes De Pisis in one of his poems. “As in a whitened sepulchre / they putridly rot / deep in the soul”.
Filippo de Pisis, Vaso dei fiori, 1948, oil on canvas, 70 x 45 cm, courtesy Filippo de Pisis Estate and P420, Bologna
Filippo de Pisis, Vaso di fiori con libro, 1947, Oil on canvas, 19 11/16 x 15 3/4 in, Photo by Carlo Favero, Courtesy of Filippo de Pisis Estate and P420, Bologna
Filippo de Pisis, Natura morta con radicchio e mele, 1949, Oil on canvas board, 13 25/32 x 23 15/64 in, Photo by Carlo Favero, Courtesy of Filippo de Pisis Estate and P420, Bologna
De Pisis’s later work is the focus of a solo presentation by P420 (Bologna) at Independent 20th Century this year. “The paintings created by De Pisis from the end of the 1940s, especially during his stay at Villa Fiorita, are extremely contemporary,” explains gallery co-founder Alessandro Pasotti. “The brushstrokes are quicker and closer to abstraction. Blank and empty zones feature in the compositions, almost anticipating new artistic movements like Provisional Painting that would emerge decades later.”
One of the most celebrated modern painters in Italy, De Pisis is a lesser-known figure outside of his native country. His work has been presented only recently in international exhibitions, such as the pairing with contemporary painter Louis Fratino in the current edition of the Venice Biennale and a dual show with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe at the Currier Museum of Art in New Hampshire.
Alongside his later flower paintings and still lifes, P420 is presenting a group of De Pisis’s male portraits and nudes on paper. “This aspect of his work is less familiar to many and has always been overlooked,” continues Pasotti. These pencil or ink sketches, depicting male models and prostitutes invited by the artist to his studio, are fresh, frisky records of fleeting encounters; visual traces of his queer romantic geography. In a provincial and homophobic post-war Italian society, De Pisis’s queerness was viewed with suspicion. The artist was recognized at the 1948 Venice Biennale with a room dedicated to his paintings, but was denied the Grand Prize due to his sexual orientation; the award was given instead to Giorgio Morandi.
Filippo de Pisis, Giani da Udine, 1939, watercolored china on paper, 32.2 x 42.7 cm, photography by Carlo Favero, courtesy Filippo de Pisis Estate and P420, Bologna
Filippo de Pisis, Cielo a Villa Fiorita, 1952, Courtesy Associazione per Filippo de Pisis, Milano
In the ink on paper drawing Giani da Udine (1939), which will be shown at Independent, the delicate silhouette of a seated young man gently emerges from the surface. The shapes are lightly sketched, yet animated by a moving joie de vivre. A splash of blue paint softly caresses his genitals. In his left hand, the figure holds a tiny bird, perhaps a reference to the Renaissance painter Giovanni da Udine, as the title suggests.
As De Pisis’s disease progressed, his works became more and more rarefied. The colors are somber and evanescent; the objects take on a spectral quality. In a 1952 painting, Cielo a Villa Fiorita (private collection), the artist summons all the elements of his artistic vision, retrospectively, in what could be considered a final self-portrait. There are the bare essentials of a seascape, visible through a window; a vase with a red tulip; and an image of a male nude, placed under broken glass. And yet, despite the cracks in the glass, despite the pain and despair and the illness threatening his vision, De Pisis’s enchantment with the world and its beauty hasn’t vanished yet. Everything is still quivering.
Federico Florian is a writer, editor, and translator. His writing has appeared in The Art Newspaper, Art in America, Elephant, Flash Art and Artforum. He has translated into Italian publications by authors and art critics such as Whitney Chadwick, Jerry Saltz, Rafael Rubinstein, David Levi Strauss and Maja and Reuben Fowkes.
