Two new 20th century paintings

Today the Pinacoteca’s 20th-century collections acquire two splendid paintings by Bruno Cassinari and Filippo de Pisis, destined for the future museum in Palazzo Citterio, former home of Emilio and Maria Jesi, donors of the largest and best part of the section.

Thanks to a far-sighted policy of state acquisitions, also made possible by the attention paid by the export offices to works of great value, representative of an important phase of an artist’s work, or parts of well-known collections, the two newly purchased paintings, at the suggestion of the Milan office, are destined for Brera because they are strongly connected to the museum’s twentieth-century heritage, especially the painting by Cassinari, which had previously belonged to Emilio Jesi, while the de Pisis fills a chronological gap among the master’s masterpieces already present.

Made in the years of the master’s great activity The Study of the Painter Bruno Cassinari, is a work of sensitive quality, characterized by the strong cubist implantation, which the master assimilated by frequenting Picasso during a long stay in Antibes: the model’s body appears solidly framed and plastically harmonized with the crowding of schematic objects in the painter’s atelier; dominating the balanced composition is an atmosphere of delicate, dreamlike suspension, where even opposing tones – light pinks of the nude and blues, ochres, and intense blacks of the environment and works – accord in perfect harmony.

Presented in 1926 at Margherita Sarfatti’s First Exhibition of the Novecento Italiano and widely praised by critics, the painting depicts one of the artist’s workplaces: rooms, attics, and studios where she loved to collect butterflies, herbs, fabrics, books, tools and antique artifacts. The scenic framing of a corner of enclosed space offers the viewer a composition of powerful visual impact, appreciable for its organicity and completeness, where the studied spatial balance of objects is reinforced by the delicate modulation of projected light and shadow. Balance and skillful dosage of colors (the cold livid of the walls enlivened by the pink borders of the decorations, curtains and book pages) also derive in Tragic Interior from the artist’s metaphysical frequentations (Morandi, de Chirico, Carrà) and give the work an atmosphere of great calmness and suspension declined in a very personal lyrical code.

Share