Giorgio de Chirico. The Enigma of a Day. Paris, early 1914. Oil on canvas, 6' 1 1/4" x 55" (185.5 x 139.7 cm). © 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome. Digital Image © 2019 MoMA, N.Y.

“What is especially needed is great sensitivity: to look upon everything in the world as enigma…”

Giorgio de Chirico

“What is especially needed is great sensitivity: to look upon everything in the world as enigma….To live in the world as in an immense museum of strange things.” 1 So wrote the Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico, who made paintings of classical piazzas populated with spectral figures and shadows, knitting together purposefully distorted perspectives and tilted grounds. These claustrophobic dreamscapes, with their atmosphere of melancholy and uneasy menace, captivated the French avant-garde of the 1910s and later inspired the Surrealists.

Arriving in Paris in 1911, de Chirico immersed himself in the city’s avant-garde circles. Guillaume Apollinaire, the experimental poet and defender of Cubism, soon became the artist’s champion, writing in an early review of a small exhibition de Chirico staged in his studio, “The art of this young painter is an interior and cerebral art which bears no relation to that of the painters of recent years.” (De Chirico would later encourage this perception of himself as an outsider.) Apollinaire also noted that de Chirico’s “very sharp and very modern sensations” often assumed an “architectural form,” perhaps in reference to The Anxious Journey, with its overlapping colonnades, which was included in that exhibition. 2

In The Enigma of a Day, painted a year after The Anxious Journey, in 1914, de Chirico took up the motifs of his previous composition and expanded them. The sharply delineated shadows and sun-bleached arcades now framed a piazza, deserted but for a towering marble statue, a partially obscured moving carriage, and two human figures casting exaggerated shadows in the distance. One of de Chirico’s great innovations was to marry these vaguely classical, if highly simplified, architectural elements with the recently developed pictorial language of Cubism, typified by flattened spatial structures, shapes reduced to bold and simple planes, muted tones with little modeling, and compressed space. Another hallmark of his style was a seemingly effortless conjunction of incompatible spatial systems into a single, coherent scene. In The Enigma of a Day, he plays with both shallow and steep spaces and employs numerous vanishing points. These spatial inconsistencies only reveal themselves on close examination, undermining any initial impression of stability.

In 1917, recently returned to Italy, de Chirico founded the Scuola Metafisica (or Metaphysical School), formulating its principles with his brother Alberto Savinio and the Futurist artist Carlo Carrà. De Chirico compared the metaphysical work of art to “the flat surface of a perfectly calm ocean,” which “disturbs us…by all the unknown that is hidden in the depth.” 3 The term would come to encompass all his work produced between roughly 1911 and 1917; it is this “metaphysical” period that would prove highly influential to the Surrealists in the following decade.

Led by André Breton, himself inspired by the writings of Sigmund Freud, Surrealism sought to give greater license to the irrational forces of the unconscious and to represent this artistically through what Breton described as the poetic “juxtaposition of two realities.” 4 In paintings like The Song of Love, with its incongruous combination of familiar objects, the Surrealists saw an important precedent; indeed, Breton later called de Chirico a “sentry.” 5 But even as the Surrealists collected and exhibited de Chirico’s paintings from the 1910s, the artist himself had left that work behind, calling for a return to skilled drawing in an apparent about-face that provoked their scorn.

Natalie Dupêcher, independent scholar, 2017

  1. Giorgio de Chirico, [Manoscritti Eluard], in Giorgio de Chirico Scritti/I, ed. Andrea Cortellessa (Milan: Bompiani, 2008), 612. Translation by the author.

  2. Guillaume Apollinaire, “La Vie artistique: G. de Chirico – Pierre Brune,” L’Intransigeant (October 9, 1913): 3.

  3. Giorgio de Chirico, “On Metaphysical Art,” trans. Joshua C. Taylor, in Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics, ed. Herschel B. Chipp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 451. Originally published as “Sull’arte metafisica,” Valori Plastici (Rome) 1, no. 4-5 (April-May 1919), 15-18.

  4. André Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism” (1924); translated in Andre Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: Ann Arbor Paperback, 1972), 37.

  5. André Breton, “Le Surréalisme et la Peinture,” in La Révolution surréaliste, no. 7 (June 15, 1926): 3; translated in Breton, Surrealism and Painting, trans. Simon Watson Taylor (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 13.

Wikipedia entry
Introduction
Giuseppe Maria Alberto Giorgio de Chirico ( KIRR-ik-oh; Italian: [ˈdʒordʒo de ˈkiːriko]; 10 July 1888 – 20 November 1978) was an Italian artist and writer born in Greece. In the years before World War I, he founded the scuola metafisica art movement, which profoundly influenced the surrealists. His best-known works often feature Roman arcades, long shadows, mannequins, trains, and illogical perspective. His imagery reflects his affinity for the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer and of Friedrich Nietzsche, and for the mythology of his birthplace. After 1919, he became a critic of modern art, studied traditional painting techniques, and later worked in a neoclassical or neo-Baroque style, while frequently revisiting the metaphysical themes of his earlier work. In 2018 it was suggested that de Chirico may have suffered from Alice in Wonderland syndrome.
Wikidata
Q156622
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License
Getty record
Introduction
Giorgio de Chirico was an important source of inspiration for artists throughout Europe in the inter-war years, particularly the surrealists. His career was marked by stylistic changes and reversals. In his early heroic phase, he created fictive space with exaggerated one-point perspective rendering city squares, receding arcades, distant walls, or claustrophobic interiors. Human forms were represented as classical statues or mannequins.
Nationalities
Italian, Austrian, Greek
Gender
Male
Roles
Artist, Writer, Designer, Lithographer, Landscapist, Illustrator, Painter, Sculptor
Names
Giorgio de Chirico, Giorgio Di Chirico, Giorgio De Chirico, Tziortzio Ḏe Kiriko, Jorujo De Kiriko, Tziortzio D̲e Kiriko, Giorgio di Chirico, Chirico, g. de chirico, de Chirico, giorgio di chirico
Ulan
500032635
Information from Getty’s Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License

Works

109 works online

Exhibitions

Publications

  • MoMA Highlights: 375 Works from The Museum of Modern Art Flexibound, 408 pages
  • MoMA Now: Highlights from The Museum of Modern Art—Ninetieth Anniversary Edition Hardcover, 424 pages
  • Being Modern: Building the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art Exhibition catalogue, Hardcover, 288 pages
  • De Chirico: The Song of Love Paperback, 48 pages
  • De Chirico Exhibition catalogue, Clothbound, pages
  • De Chirico Exhibition catalogue, Paperback, pages
  • Giorgio de Chirico Exhibition catalogue, Clothbound, pages
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