Federico Pfister / De Pistoris (1898-1975)

The main event at the Museo Vincenzo Vela has as its centre the leading character the Swiss artist and intellectual Federico Pfister. A citizen of Schaffhausen who cut an unusual figure in the Swiss and Italian cultural worlds, Pfister will be studied through a monographic exhibition.

Born in 1898 into a cosmopolitan and wealthy milieu in Naples, Pfister was left an orphan when young. He studied history of art with Heinrich Wölfflin in Munich and then archaeology at the University of Florence. In the 1930s he worked as an architect in Rome while also translating from German and commenting important texts on the history of art by Winckelmann and Burckhardt. He showed a particular inclination for philosophy, which became his principal field of research and to which he contributed Il metodo della scienza (1948) and I fondamenti del divenire (1973). So influential was he in this field that Giovanni Gentile offered him the chair in Philosophy at the University of Naples, which he was obliged to refuse due to his foreign nationality.

A skilled watercolourist and draughtsman, Federico Pfister was also an interesting painter, an aspect of his output that the exhibition at the Museo Vela focuses on. From 19217 he assumed the pseudonym of De Pistoris, and during the period between the two world wars he was a member of the so-called Second Futurism, of which he became an outstanding exponent along with Prampolini, Pannaggi, Depero and Paladini. He continued to paint until his death in Rome in 1975, shunning subjection to a single form of expression, and alternating more naturalistic phases with periods in which he favoured decomposition of the human form and the landscape.

The exhibition at the Museo Vincenzo Vela presents the artist's pictorial development through more than one hundred and twenty drawings, sketches, watercolours, oil paintings and preparatory canvases for a cycle of frescoes that was never executed.