Postwar Legacy
Conflicting Narratives & Identities
In the immediate years following Parin’s death in the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen, a retrospective exhibition in Trieste celebrated his artistic legacy. More recently, Parin’s portraits and drawings have been featured in shows about Trieste as a cultural and artistic center during the first half of the 20th century. What curators today consider to be “characteristically Parin” are his paintings that engage with some of the trends in vogue in Europe in the years before and after the First World War.
In addition to being celebrated as a modernist painter, Trieste’s German Catholic Church claimed Parin as “a friend, an artist, a Christian” at a memorial held in 1964 on the 20th anniversary of his death. In 1989, his painting, Harmony in Red and White (1914), was featured in an exhibition held at the Jewish Museum in New York entitled Gardens and Ghettos: The Art of Jewish Life in Italy. The catalogue briefly mentions Parin’s Swiss citizenship and death in Bergen-Belsen, but absent are any references to his conversion to Catholicism and his paintings with Christian subjects.
Parin’s multiple identities during the different periods of his life include Austrian, Swiss, and Italian nationalities as well as the Jewish and Catholic religions. Although no “ethnic identity” is evident in his style or subject matter, today Parin’s Jewish heritage and eventual death during the Holocaust are more prominently featured. One of Parin’s self-portraits appears in the Carlo and Vera Wagner Jewish Museum in Trieste, and a Stolperstein (stumbling stone) marks the threshold of the house he was living in when he was arrested by the Gestapo in 1944. The city’s Revoltella Museum, which hid the work of local Jewish artists in 1940, displays many of Parin’s paintings today, but also acknowledges that his Jewish identity only became an issue after the codification of Italy’s racial laws in 1938.
The Catholic-themed paintings in Cottonwood’s Necki Springer collection remind us that Parin’s story and legacy are full of nuances not visible at first sight.
