Filippo de Pisis and les Italiens de Paris

Exhibition: Filippo de Pisis and les Italiens de Paris

Curated by: Paolo Bolpagni and Maddalena Tibertelli de Pisis

Catalogue: Dario Cimorelli Editore, Milano

Exhibition Venue: Fondazione Biscozzi | Rimbaud, piazzetta Baglivi 4, Lecce

Public Opening: 14 February – 10 May 2026

Timetable: from Tuesday to Sunday, 4pm – 7pm. Closed on Monday.

Open on Sunday 5 April (Easter), 6 April (Easter Monday), 25 April, 1° May 2026

Entrance for the exhibition: €5,00.

Permanent collection + exhibition: € 8.00. Reduced: € 5.00 (for groups of more than fifteen people residents in Lecce and in the province, children under eighteen, primary and secondary school groups, students of university, art academies and conservatories with booklets, teachers, ICOM members). Free admission for children up to six years old, disabled (and a companion), a companion for each group, tourist guides and journalists with ID cards.

Fondazione Biscozzi | Rimbaud, in partnership with the Association for Filippo de Pisis, presents the exhibition Filippo de Pisis and les Italiens de Paris, curated by Paolo Bolpagni and Maddalena Tibertelli de Pisis, dedicated to one of the most original and international chapters in the Italian art between the late 1920s and early 1930s.

The exhibition explores the experience of the Italiens de Paris, a group of Italian artists active in the French capital united by an openness towards Europe, as well as a position of partial and conscious “rebellion” against the dominant approach of the Novecento italiano.

The beating heart of the group was the Groupe of Seven, formed by Massimo Campigli, Giorgio de Chirico, Filippo de Pisis, René Paresce, Alberto Savinio, Gino Severini and Mario Tozzi, protagonists of an exhibition season spanning between 1928 and 1933. The group shared cultural references, professional habits and a common vision of the classicism, understood in a modern, Mediterranean anti-dogmatic key, marked by formal freedom, plurality of languages and dialogue with international culture.

The exhibition focuses on the figure of Filippo de Pisis (Ferrara, 1896 – Milan, 1956), starting with his masterpiece painting Dalie (1932), on display in the first room of the permanent exhibition at the Fondazione Biscozzi | Rimbaud in Lecce. A significant collection of over twenty works by the Ferrara-born artist, created between the mid-1920s and early 1930s, provides a direct comparison with a carefully selected group of paintings by the other six members of the Groupe des Sept, belonging to the same period.

“It was not just a chance encounter of painters living more or less permanently in Paris, but also an association connected by a certain commonality of ideals and human and professional customs,” explains co-curator Paolo Bolpagni, emphasising the cultural and creative cohesion that characterised the experience of the Italiens de Paris.

The exhibition highlights similarities and differences within the group, emphasising their shared international outlook and their distance from an Italian context increasingly oriented towards monumentalism, muralism and the “modern classicism” theorised by Margherita Sarfatti.

The exhibition is accompanied by a trilingual catalogue (Italian, French and English), edited by Dario Cimorelli Editore, containing historical-critical essays and the colour reproductions of all the works on exhibition.

In the photo:

Details of the work: Filippo de Pisis, Interior of the Paris studio, 1930, Turin, private collection.