Filippo de Pisis(Ferrara 1896 – Milan 1956)Portrait of Allegro, 1940Oil on cardboard glued on board, 71 x 61 cm

Filippo de Pisis Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art. Donation Franca Fenga Malabotta, inv. 2771

When he left for Italy in July 1939, De Pisis did not imagine that the outbreak of World War II would end his fourteen-year Parisian life. Surprised by events, after wandering around several northern cities, he settled in Milan and here, despite the war, lived a full and fulfilling existence. De Pisis paints and sells a lot, meets poets, writers, collectors and critics. In his diary he notes, “I feel the smoke of celebrity. Happy period of my life.” To this phase dates the Portrait of Allegro, a large oil on cardboard dated “Rimini ’40.” It is one of many portraits painted that year, including. The Aviator (inv. 2761). Both belonged to his friend Giovanni Comisso, later passing to the Malabotta collection and finally to the Ferrara civic galleries. Famous are Comisso’s words in the My association with de Pisis about the painting, “When he was back in Milan I went to see him. He always lived at the Hotel Vittoria and showed me a large painting he had done in Rimini, the portrait of Allegro, a boy with green eyes he had met on the beach. Massimo Bontempelli was with me, and on seeing it he said that that painting belonged to a new classicism. […] De Pisis had written with his brush in the background, playing on the boy’s name, “not Allegro but Allegri,” once in a while judging himself with pride in comparing him to a Correggio.” Allegro is part of the ranks of boys loved and drawn by De Pisis for almost the entire span of his existence; of these papers the Ferrara civic museums preserve an important fund in terms of breadth and quality. And with these drawings the painting shares not only the subject, but also the rapid and expressive style of the sign that captures the model in an instant, letting large portions of the cardboard surface.