Filippo de Pisis

(Ferrara 1896 – Milan 1956)

The fulminate gladiolus, 1930

Oil on cardboard glued on board, 71.5 x 51 cm

Filippo de Pisis Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art. Donation Franca Fenga Malabotta, inv. 2766

Settling in Paris, in 1925, De Pisis immersed himself in the study of the masterpieces of the ancients and moderns that he could see in the museums and galleries of the French capital and allowed himself to be permeated by the feverish cultural life of the metropolis. The multiform baggage of his training-from his scholarly, literary and botanical interests to his art-historical studies to his contacts with metaphysical painting-found new sap to germinate into a highly personal poetic universe.

The fulminate gladiolus testifies to the first maturity gained at the opening of the 1930s, when De Pisis’s art seemed to find a sharper and more eloquent language to express that religion of things to which he had been faithful since his youth. According to the account of his literary friend Giovanni Comisso, this masterpiece was made in Cortina, one evening in the summer of 1930, while painting a bouquet of flowers: “Among those flowers he had painted there a pink gladiolus, which he had not picked, which he had not added to the bouquet, but which had been fantasized about by him. In fact, that gladiolus was transfigured with very few brushstrokes, all of them impetuous, into a kind of pinkish calla lily, which especially made one think of the female sex that had appeared to him by intuition. And above in the direction of it he had traced in a crooked way a yellow ray that he said was lightning in the instant of striking that grave flower of mystery.” Mindful of the refined sensuality of Manet’s flower vases, the painting embodies a touching depiction of the fragile beauty of life, thanks to a mise-en-scène that is as simple as it is visionary.

The fulminate gladiolus became part of the Ferrara collections thanks to the generous donation of Franca Fenga Malabotta, who left Ferrara the collection of twenty-four oil paintings, seventy drawings, and one hundred and seven assembled by her husband, the notary, collector, and art critic Manlio Malabotta, between 1940 and 1969.