Portrait (“Rimpianto”). Circa 1950.

Ink on the page of an Italian book. Measurements: 22.5 x 15.4 cm. Signed in the lower left corner "Del Prete". On the back, a printed poem titled “Rimpianto” (Italian for “Lamento”). The work has lost a small marginal section in the lower right corner. Former Alfredo González Garaño collection. 

With a few strokes of black ink and by brush, Del Prete composed this profile of a young woman. She used as a support the sheet of an Italian poetry book, with the text printed on the back of it and also on the front of it, covered with the stains that make up her hair. Synthetically made, she completes the drawing, a hand and the clothing, with a texture.

Del Prete is especially recognized for his abstract works, he was in fact one of the introducers of that avant-garde cultivated in Paris on his return from that country, in a 1933 exhibition at the halls of the Friends of Art Association. However, as María Amalia García writes in the cataloging of the work Abstraction of the National Museum of Fine Arts, "Del Prete was a highly plural artist and his searches were not limited to a specific poetics: his transit through abstraction alternated with works figurative and also ventured into informalist gestures”. Indeed, these figurative portraits, profiles with a certain cubist air, can be seen in his work painted several decades after that exhibition, for example, in Juicio de París or Naturaleza o niño, from 1952 and 1953 respectively, both also at the MNBA. Currently an exhibition at the Malba brings together his work together with that of Yente, his partner in life and in art.

Juan Del Prete (Vasto, Italy, 1897 - Buenos Aires, 1987) was an Italian-Argentine painter, draughtsman, sculptor, set designer, layout designer and self-taught photographer. In 1925 he made his first submission to the Salón Nacional, and in 1926, his first personal exhibition at Amigos del Arte. He received a scholarship from this institution in 1929, with which he traveled to Paris, where he joined the Abstraction-Création-Art non figuratif group, along with artists such as Arp, Mondrian, Calder, Nicholson, Hepworth and Vantongerloo, among others. . Upon his return in 1933 he exhibited, as we mentioned, his abstract works, paintings and also sculptures, generating a certain stir. Sixty long years of a fruitful career followed, with exhibitions throughout the country and abroad and numerous awards, ranging from the Gold Medal Award at the Paris International Exhibition in 1937, to the Platinum Konex in 1982 and the National Consecration Award. from 1983 towards the end of his life.