Project Description
Gino Parin (Trieste 1876 – Bergen Belsen 1944), Female figure in red with red curtain
Oil on canvas cm 148 x 67 signed (Gino Parin) lower right.
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Exhibitions
Group Exhibition, Trieste, Galleria Michelazzi, September 1918
Bibliography
Gino Parin, catalogue curated by C. Ragazzoni, 2003, p. 417
The woman portrayed by the Trieste painter Gino Parin in this large-format oil painting is, in all likelihood, Fanny Lackenbacher, wife of the Jewish engineer Moise Mario Tedeschi, protagonist of a very large number of drawings and oils by the artist, starting from 1911 and until the premature death of the woman, which took place in 1927. Daughter of a Hungarian-born official of the Adriatic Meeting of Sicurtà , Ernesto Lackenbacher, and Rachele Morpurgo, Fanny was born in Trieste on 25 July 1879. Relations between the Lackenbacher family and the city’s artistic environment were frequent. Fanny adhered to the initiative promoted by Wostry in 1907, on the occasion of the Carnival, to stage fictitious “Musei Trieste” at the headquarters of the Circolo Artistico at the Portici di Chiozza. She also attended the Trieste Artistic Circle and was the owner of the house on Via Besenghi where the painter went to live on his return from Munich in 1914.
As in most of Fanny’s portraits, by Gino Parin (the real name was Federico Pollack), he leaves the background undefined, as if to emphasize the importance given to the silhouette of his favorite model. The influence of the secessionist lesson in linear refinements is unquestionable in this painting: the compositional choice of the full-length portrait, and the full evidence given to the effect of light and transparency of the dress, seem to mention, in particular, John Singer Sargent. Fanny has her arms wrapped in a white curtain that, blending into the monochrome background, allows Parin to demonstrate his realistic talents in the material differentiation of fabrics. Unlike Sargent, however, Parin, who loves the accords of complementary colors, has vigorously synthetic traits and cleverly exploits, on the dress, the contrast between pearly white and purple red to obtain constructive shadows, blinding flashes and light transparencies. The touches of glossy white and the search for transparencies on the white characterize the works of the late Ten.
Shrewd and original performer of Belgian symbolism and the secessionist language of the other side of the Alps, Parin was able to move with ease between Munich and Vienna, in contact with the main artists who worked there at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Absorbing in a personal and original way the different features that came from the different movements, the Secessions, the world of magazines and international exhibitions, just between Munich and Vienna, the Trieste artist was able to find his own style and obtained a remarkable success, getting important prizes and awards.
