Ernesto de Fiori started his artistic education in Rome, Italy, then continued in Munich, Germany, from 1903 on, and later in Paris, France, between 1911 and 1914, where he made his first works. He enlisted himself in the German army in 1916 and, after fighting the First World War (1914-18) as a soldier and acting as a correspondent of an Italian newspaper in Germany, he moved to Zurich, Switzerland, in 1918. The artist stood out for his sculptures of stylized human figures and the rough molding. In 1936, De Fiori migrated to Brazil, fleeing from the rise of Nazism. He then started to dedicate himself more systematically to painting, focusing on the representation of local landscapes. In the 1940s, he started to get interested in urban themes and excelled in the representation of female figures, often gathered in duos or groups. It is the case of this portrait of two women embracing each other in a tidy interior, one of the artist’s 29 paintings comprised in the MASP collection. The rough silhouettes and the faces disfigured by vibrant brushstrokes bring him closer to the Expressionism he had known during his years in Germany. At the time, De Fiori, who used to live in the center of São Paulo and was a regular presence in bars and restaurants, made some paintings of brothels, which probably is the case of the Two Friends.

— MASP Curatorial Team, 2017

If De Fiori’s work does feature one predominant theme, that is undoubtedly the female form. In this field, the artist especially liked to do two-subject or group portraits. The peculiarity of the Masp painting, Two Girlfriends, one of the great moments of the artist’s career, is its violently expressionist nature, especially in dealing with the subjects’ faces. The exhibition held at the Pinacoteca do Estado revealed the existence of another version of the same work, equal in size, but carried out in a denser impasto technique (Ana Maria Stickel Collection, Laudanna 1997, p. 77). In both versions one detects a vague remembrance of metaphysics, perhaps unique in De Fiori’s work, which is related to a not less rare interest in the play of architectural lines that has some bearing on abstractionist tendencies. Urban Landscape dates from the early 40s and may have had a substantial influence on Menotti Del Picchia’s Skyscrapers, painted in the same decade.

— Unknown authorship, 1998