MASP

According to a note by Camesasca, kept in the museum documentation, the painting in question – Portrait of Gianfranco Contini at the Age of 26 and a Seascape – was identified by the great Roman novelist and poet Elza Morante (1918-1985) as being the portrait of Gianfranco Contini (1912-1992), one of the most important translators, literary critics, and literary historians of our century. The physiognomic traits seem to confirm this while the date of the painting supposes that Contini was in Paris in 1928, which in fact, is somewhat confirmed by Contini himself in his autobiographical interview with Ludovica Ripa di Meana (Diligenza e Volutta, Milan, 1989, pp. 53-54): “I was a friend of De Pisis’, who was an extremely refined man of huge kindness trapped in an insignificant and lecherous body. I often visited him in Paris and was able to see how he gradually transformed his style involving stabbing brush strokes with some very interesting methods which perhaps have not been given the attention they deserve. He used to say that he was a reasonable painter, but more of a poet, and perhaps he actually believed this”. The fine portrait of Contini shows the most intense awareness of the expressive potential of gray tones which were explored during those years in Paris, especially by Vlaminck. Mingling in the same intellectual milieu must have encouraged a mutual relation between these painters, not to mention their shared relation with intellectuals such as Waldemar George who wrote an interesting monograph on De Pisis in 1928.

— Unknown authorship, 1998

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