Filippo de Pisis
Painter
From a young age his interests were most diverse: he began his artistic career as a poet and novelist, which is what he would feel himself to be for the rest of his life. After studying at Bologna University and frequenting the city's social circles, in Ferrara he met the founders of the Metaphysical movement: De Chirico, Savinio and Carrà. In 1920, he moved to Rome and there decided to become a painter. Moving to Paris in 1925 marked a turning point in his career as a painter, thanks also to the study of the great nineteenth-century French artists, the impressionists and the contemporaries. In Paris he painted animated townscapes en plein air that were pulsing with life, portrayed models in his studio and registered the emotions that the most disparate of objects transmitted to him in his inimitable still lifes. When the Second World War broke out, he returned to Italy and worked in Milan and Venice. After l948 the passing years were marked by illness, which, in moments of respite, allowed him to create further pieces of pictorial poetry of the finest quality, even when confined in sanatoria.
