Federico Guglielmo Jehuda Pollack, who adopted the name “Gino Parin” at the turn of the 20th century, was born on August 25, 1876, in Trieste, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His parents, Lodovico and Berta Pollack, were German-speaking Ashkenazi Jews who settled in the city in the mid-19th century. They soon became distinguished members of the city’s upper middle class, with a family shipping business.
The Pollocks sent their children to German-speaking schools and the hope was that “young Fritz”, as Gino was then known, would become an entrepreneur. But, by the early 1890s, it had become clear that he had a particular aptitude for drawing and painting. He first studied with a local Jewish master, Gerolamo Navarra. Then, when Navarra moved to Venice in 1895, Gino headed to Munich to continue his training at their Academy of Art.
Before arriving in Germany, Gino had successfully applied to become a citizen of Switzerland as several of his family members had relocated from Trieste to Lugano. To do so, he had to give up his Austrian nationality. In 1898, he also converted to Catholicism so that he could marry his then-pregnant girlfriend, Ella Auler.
After traveling back and forth between Munich and Trieste during the first decade of the 20th century, Parin settled in the latter city in 1914, shortly before the outbreak of World War I. Italy annexed the region in 1920, at which point the artist assumed dual Swiss and Italian citizenships. He became one of Trieste’s most successful portrait and landscape painters, employing an aesthetic that merged the traditions established by past masters such as Titian and Velazquez with the avant-garde trends in vogue in Europe in the years before and after the First World War (e.g., Symbolism, a movement that emphasized emotions and different psychological states). His work was exhibited all over Europe and even in the United States, garnering many awards.
The rise of Italian fascism in the 1930s did not, at first, curtail Parin’s career. In 1930, he received the commission to paint the portraits of his country’s king and queen, Vittorio Emanuele III and Elena of Montenegro.
Seven years later, his Portrait of a Woman won the Premio del Duce or “Mussolini Prize” when it was exhibited in Trieste; this honor allowed it to be displayed later that year in the Italian Art Exhibition at the Universal Exposition in Paris.
Parin was in Trieste when Benito Mussolini proclaimed Italy’s racial antisemitic laws in 1938 in the city’s main square, Piazza Unità d’Italia. The antisemitic turn of Italian fascism greatly affected him, despite his conversion to Catholicism and his Swiss citizenship. He could no longer exhibit publicly and, officially, only work for Jewish clients.
Nazi Germany annexed Trieste as the capital of their Adriatic Coastland in 1943. Not long afterwards, on April 14, 1944, the German Secret Police (Gestapo) arrested Parin. Despite the efforts of his family and the Swiss Consulate to secure his release, he was imprisoned, first in Trieste and then in an Italian camp. In mid-May, he was deported to the Nazi concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen, where he died on June 9, 1944.
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