The archaism, emblematic of the painter’s unusual interpretation of classicism, envelops the portrait style of the painting and, without concealing it, transports it to a dimension of suspended time. 

The profile that emerges from the pale, speckled background is one of the variants with which Massimo Campigli interprets the female figure, the subject at the centre of all his painting. This canvas from 1946 is an imaginary portrait, a cameo drawn from layered chromatic matter that highlights a single individual, a solitary figure compared to the ranks of women recurrent in his work. In a text from 1955, the artist, who studied the work of Freud and Jung, attributed his figurative imagery to a childhood fantasy, to a “lavish oriental palace” inhabited by “favourites”, “sultanas” and “female slaves”: an “elaborate” dream that had been updated over the years, fuelled by complicit and playful atmospheres, but also by what he called a “‘gently’ sadistic vision” of those female prisoners “shut away and isolated in their room, their clothes wrapped tightly around them.”¹ Born in Berlin, the son of an unmarried girl of upper-class origin, Max Ihlenfeldt grew up in Florence and then in Milan, surrounded by the women of his family - his grandmother and his two sisters, born out of his mother’s subsequent marriage. Not yet an artist, he used the pseudonym Massimo Campigli for the first time to sign “Giornale + Strada. Parole in libertà” published in 1914 in the Futurist magazine Lacerba,² when he was working as an apprentice for the Corriere della Sera newspaper, going on to become its Paris correspondent from 1919 onwards. Self-taught, he began his career as a painter in the dynamic and cosmopolitan setting of the École de Paris, following a path justified by his debut at the Salon d’Automne in 1921, by his solo exhibition at the Casa d’Arte Bragaglia in Rome in 1923 and later by his membership of Italiens de Paris, the group headed by Mario Tozzi, which saw him exhibit alongside Giorgio de Chirico, Filippo de Pisis, Renato Paresce, Alberto Savinio and Gino Severini. When he painted Collana di perle (Pearl Necklace), Campigli was living in Italy. In the 1930s he consolidated his presence on the national art circuit with numerous exhibitions and a series of important public commissions. He was one of the signatories of the manifesto of mural painting written by Mario Sironi in 1933 and signed, along with Carlo Carrà and Achille Funi, a programme that aimed for a synthesis between art and architecture, reviving the ancient traditions of fresco painting and mosaic in a modernist key and using them as instruments for the ideology and rhetoric of Fascist humanism. Campigli recreated his habitual gynaecea in the interiors of public buildings (the atrium of the Faculty of Literature in Padua, the Palazzo di Giustizia in Milan) and on the walls of exhibition venues and pavilions (the Milan Triennali and the Exposition Internationale in Paris in 1937), intensifying the symbiosis between figure and architecture, a principle that also underlies his smaller paintings, dotted with stage flats, shelves, niches, windows and stairs. The blurred and limy background from which the young woman with the necklace emerges recalls the hues of the wall, impressed with the memory of a technique that the artist described with the word fresque during his years in Paris. On the 1946 canvas, Campigli works the pasty texture of the oil paint with a brush and palette knife, obtaining an uneven and grainy finish with thicker patches, concretions and marbling. He merges and amalgamates the subject and background in the continuity of the bluey greys and dull pinks, the earthy hues subtly highlighted by the old red of the earring and lips and the Verona green and cobalt blue reflections of the pearls. The effect is that of a wall painting, a flat image, appearing from amidst the cracks that simulate the depth and slow sedimentation of time, requiring the eyes to delve into the image. The archaism, emblematic of the painter’s unusual interpretation of classicism, envelops the portrait style of the painting and, without concealing it, transports it to a dimension of suspended time. The piece of jewellery worn by the young woman is a symbol of nobility but also a “burden”, according to the function that the artist assigns to necklaces - inspired by Etruscan paintings and introduced as early as 1929 - to suggest “the idea that they cannot or must not be removed”.³ However, the gracious gesture of the hand, highlighted by a stroke of paint at the level of her fingers, adds movement and vitality to the figure, intent upon playing with the pearl necklace, which is wrapped several times around her neck, in keeping with a fashion in vogue in the late 1930s.⁴ The “magical transcription” of “harmonious gestures” is the characteristic attributed to Campigli in Marino Bonini’s introduction to the catalogue Artistas Italianos de Hoy,⁵ for the exhibition organised by the Milanese gallery owner Vittorio Barbaroux in July 1947 at the Galleria Müller in Buenos Aires, where Collar de perlas was exhibited alongside another four paintings by the artist. After returning to Italy, the painting remained the property of the gallery in Milan, where Francesco Federico Cerruti purchased it in around the 1990s, completing the Campigli group that he had begun to collect some time previously.

Giorgina Bertolino

¹ Campigli 1995, pp. 69-71.

² Id. 1914.

³ Id. 1995, p. 105.

⁴ E. Weiss, M. Weiss, “Campigli e la moda”, in Mamiano 2014, p. 57. In their essay on the relationship between Campigli and fashion, Eva and Markus Weiss make particular mention of an article by Regina Relang published in Vogue on 1 May 1938.

⁵ M. Bonini, “Introduzione”, in Buenos Aires 1947, p. 8.