This article addresses the concept of en plein air regarding men’s fashion in early twentieth-century Italy. The act of painting outdoors has been addressed at length in the field of art history as one of the most radical practices of nineteenth-century avantgardes. It focused on the changing appearance of light and weather conditions, as in the case of the renowned French Impressionist painters, who often represented women and their clothing in the natural environment. However, en plein air can also provide an opportunity to reframe men’s fashion in its relationship with the environment. The Italian painter and dandy Filippo de Pisis (1896–56) relied on en plein air to constitute his peculiar vision of ‘pictorial elegance’, connecting painting skills with the experience of wearing clothes in open spaces, for instance, during a stroll in the Mediterranean sunshine. This article analyses de Pisis’s artworks and writings on male elegance and its pictorial qualities, aiming to explore the under-investigated invisibility of men’s fashion in the early twentieth century. By doing so, it challenges the misogyny of the antifashion rhetoric of Modernist aesthetics. The case of de Pisis is particularly interesting in this regard because it provides an illuminating pictorial and textual affective interpretation of the interdependences between men’s bodies, the colours and fabrics of their clothes and the qualities of the open-air environment in which they were experienced. This contribution intends to shed light on the concept of ‘pictorial elegance’ that was for de Pisis a queer, destabilizing and poetic transfiguration of masculinity in the context of European Modernism.
En plein air: Light, space and fashion in Filippo de Pisis’s aesthetics
alessandra vaccari
2023-01-01
Abstract
This article addresses the concept of en plein air regarding men’s fashion in early twentieth-century Italy. The act of painting outdoors has been addressed at length in the field of art history as one of the most radical practices of nineteenth-century avantgardes. It focused on the changing appearance of light and weather conditions, as in the case of the renowned French Impressionist painters, who often represented women and their clothing in the natural environment. However, en plein air can also provide an opportunity to reframe men’s fashion in its relationship with the environment. The Italian painter and dandy Filippo de Pisis (1896–56) relied on en plein air to constitute his peculiar vision of ‘pictorial elegance’, connecting painting skills with the experience of wearing clothes in open spaces, for instance, during a stroll in the Mediterranean sunshine. This article analyses de Pisis’s artworks and writings on male elegance and its pictorial qualities, aiming to explore the under-investigated invisibility of men’s fashion in the early twentieth century. By doing so, it challenges the misogyny of the antifashion rhetoric of Modernist aesthetics. The case of de Pisis is particularly interesting in this regard because it provides an illuminating pictorial and textual affective interpretation of the interdependences between men’s bodies, the colours and fabrics of their clothes and the qualities of the open-air environment in which they were experienced. This contribution intends to shed light on the concept of ‘pictorial elegance’ that was for de Pisis a queer, destabilizing and poetic transfiguration of masculinity in the context of European Modernism.
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