Filippo de Pisis

(Ferrara 1896 – Milan 1956)

Still life with kingfisher, 1925

Oil on cardboard, 46 x 71.5 cm

Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art “Filippo de Pisis,” inv. 640.

Still life with kingfisher records Filippo de Pisis’ first steps toward the acquisition of his own pictorial language and the gradual loosening of his primitive literary and poetic vocation. During the period of World War I, in his native Ferrara, De Pisis had supported as a critic the dazzling metaphysical season of De Chirico and Carrà. He had then settled in Rome where he conducted his own painting apprenticeship, studying the masterpieces of classical and Baroque art and frequenting the artistic circles of the “return to order.”

Still life with kingfisher dates from 1925, when De Pisis was preparing his final move to Paris, and constitutes an advance on the “beautiful painting” and “somewhat dry” painting-so the artist himself had called it-of his earlier Roman years. The color tones are intense, the pictorial material is full, and the whole, though somewhat static, is convincing. The still life represents the literary-poetic genre par excellence in De Pisis’s oeuvre and, again, through the thoughtful staging of objects, a real narrative is orchestrated that is full of suggestion, hinting at a farewell and leave-taking from one’s hometown and adolescent years. The Pascolian theme of the feeling of death, made poignant by the vividness of the bird’s plumage, is diluted by the other carefully arranged objects: a fan, a glass, an orange, a pack of cigarettes. These also include a small nocturnal marina that exudes its own romantic atmosphere over the rest of the composition. The picture-within-a-picture motif is recurrent in his production, particularly in the paintings of 1925-26. Sometimes these are De Pisis’s homage to a master he loved; in other cases they are anonymous compositions, blank canvases or signed by the artist himself, as in the Still life with kingfisher. Qui ha voluto forse inserire una prova giovanile, un cimento degli anni ormai distanti in cui la pittura era ancora soltanto il commento figurativo alla preponderante attività letteraria.