Art: Humming Bird

Italian art these days is a three-ring circus. Painter Filippo de Pisis, 55, seems as out of place in it as a hummingbird in a cage of acrobatic bears. While his countrymen have been shooting off futuristic fireworks or ponderously balancing metaphysics and Marxism, he has darted and hovered, recording the surface of things, in glancing, wing-light strokes.

His fellow Italians like his delicacy and deftness. This week two exhibitions of De Pisis’ graceful still lifes, on-the-wing landscapes and gentle portraits were showing simultaneously in Milan and his home town of Ferrara. On view in Rome was his sensitive portrait of French Novelist Colette, which had won him a million-lire Premio Roma.

Like his painting, De Pisis’ life has combined elegance with fastidious aloofness from the rougher realities. The son of a minor Italian nobleman, as a boy he preferred botany to ball games. He was tutored at home. In 1925, after his father had died, leaving him a small legacy, he headed for Paris, to drift casually through its salons and cafes. In 1940 he moved to Venice, where he became a familiar sight, plying the canals in his huge gondola, a parrot perched on his shoulder, the words “fleur de misere” (flower of misery) printed in red across the chest of his heavy navy-blue sweater. At his daily teas, intellectuals and artists hobnobbed with petty thieves and guttersnipes, whom he had met during his bohemian wanderings.

These days, however, De Pisis is no longer the eccentric Venetian man-about-town. Thin and aged beyond his years, he lives at a sanitarium outside Milan, for the past three years the victim of recurrent nervous disorders. He uses a cobweb-festooned greenhouse on the grounds as his studio. On favorable days when “the light is calm,” he arranges still lifes of wild flowers, cherries, beans, clusters of garlic or withered leaves on a potting table, paints them against imaginary landscapes in paler, more wistful colors than his old gay studies of Venice and France. “They are a little sad,” says De Pisis gently, “because I am ill.”