Marine Still Life with Feather

The fifteen paintings from the Jesi collection offer a sample of the multiple aspects of De Pisis’s work and allow us to follow its development through the central three decades of his activity.

De Pisis cultivated many interests, from botany to the history of art and from painting to literature: he started out as a poet and took an arts degree at Bologna in 1920. In the meantime, he began to paint under the influence of de Chirico and Carrà, whom he met in Ferrara, and the Valori Plastici group, with which he established links during a stay in Rome in 1920.
At the end of the twenties he turned his attention to the city, obsessively painting its characteristic corners and streets. After a period of travel, he returned to Italy at the outbreak of the Second World War, but was admitted to a clinic (Villa Fiorita, whence the initials “VF” set on his paintings) owing to the worsening of the mental illness that was to prevent him from working from 1954 onward.

The sense of disorientation and disquiet grew steadily, pervading Flowers with Glass and Book of 1945, Portrait of a Woman of 1950, and, above all, Marine Still Life with Feather of 1953, the absolute masterpiece of the last dramatic years of his life.