The decorative phrasing of horizontal and oblique, flat and pointy lines is sealed by the position of the hands: two overlaps that give each figure an emotional angle and dimension.

The female couple, composed of mothers and daughters, sisters and friends, is a recurring feature in the painting of Massimo Campigli. By employing the device of the double, the artist interprets an emotional subject, in compositions based upon the measured alternation of similarities and differences, symmetry and asymmetry. In this painting from 1954, the two standing figures, who are tender and mournful with just the hint of a smile, stand out against a neutral, pasty and whitewashed background. The frontal and austere arrangement of the portrait is attenuated by an atmosphere that seems to recall the photographic pose and its ties to family and social rituals. Wrapped in their cloaks, wearing jewellery and hats, the two elegant friends look ready for a social event: a reception, a concert or the theatre, an environment that featured in the artist’s iconography from the late 1930s. 

“I compose the painting with great care […] ensuring that all the outlines flow harmoniously,” wrote Campigli in 1955. “I’d like to catch my viewer’s eye and guide him around the painting, through straight and curved lines and corners […] And when I paint pairs of figures who resemble one another, I achieve a result of the same kind: the eye is encouraged to flit from one figure to another in order to compare them.”¹ This visual mechanism is what makes it possible to unravel the silent static nature of the canvas in the Cerruti Collection. The “toing and froing of the eye” triggered by the artist, assuming the slow and steady beat of a “silent pendulum” as the ideal meter,² adds dynamism to the fixed nature of the painting, highlighting the elements of its composition. The differences between the two women - their stature, the colour of their hair and skin, their headgear - culminate in the abstract aspect, cadenced by the shapes of the shawls that cloak their bodies, simplified into a typical spool shape. The decorative phrasing of horizontal and oblique, flat and pointy lines is sealed by the position of the hands: two overlaps that give each figure an emotional angle and dimension. “It could be,” explains the painter, “that the need to force my figures into geometric outlines is not something purely aesthetic. That perhaps I use it to keep my figures at a given distance from reality, or to include them in a rhythm, but on the other hand also to imprison them.”³ 

Shortly after it was completed, Le amiche (The Friends) set out on the long Trends in Italian Painting tour, the travelling fair that went around the United States, organised by Romebased Galleria L’Obelisco, founded and run by Irene Brin and Gaspero del Corso. After opening at the Cincinnati Museum of Art in October 1954, the following year it completed a circuit, visiting various sites in Saint Louis, Chicago, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, San Francisco, Baltimore and New York. During the exhibition, the painting was filmed and featured in the 1955 film noir Kiss Me Deadly, directed and produced by Robert Aldrich, which was screened in Italian cinemas as Un bacio e una pistola. In the story it forms part of the collection of the mysterious Mr William Mist. After being sold by L’Obelisco, the painting entered the collection of Clare Boothe Luce, the US Ambassador in Rome from 1953 to 1956, and her husband Henry Luce, the publisher of Time magazine. The inclusion in her collection reflects American collectors’ passion for the work of Campigli, who became known in Paris in the 1930s and subsequently through the Julien Levy Gallery in New York. After being sold by the Boothe Luce family, it was exhibited in the 1970s at the Galleria Medea in Cortina d’Ampezzo and at the Santacroce in Florence. Francesco Federico Cerruti bought it the following decade from the Galleria Gissi in Turin. 

Giorgina Bertolino

¹ Campigli 1995, p. 42.

² Ibid.

³ Ibid., p. 44.