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.
Introduction by Natalie Dupêcher, independent scholar, 2017
Giorgio de Chirico, [Manoscritti Eluard], in Giorgio de Chirico Scritti/I, ed. Andrea Cortellessa (Milan: Bompiani, 2008), 612. Translation by the author.
Guillaume Apollinaire, “La Vie artistique: G. de Chirico – Pierre Brune,” L’Intransigeant (October 9, 1913): 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.
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.
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.
- Introduction
- Giorgio de Chirico ( KIRR-ik-oh, Italian: [ˈdʒordʒo deˈkiːriko]; 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 most well-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 worked in a neoclassical or neo-Baroque style, while frequently revisiting the metaphysical themes of his earlier work.
- Wikidata
- Q156622
- 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, Greek
- Gender
- Male
- Roles
- Artist, Writer, Designer, Landscapist, 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
Exhibitions
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518: A Surrealist Art History
Ongoing
MoMA
Collection gallery
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510: Machines, Mannequins, and Monsters
Oct 21, 2019–Sep 7, 2020
MoMA
Collection gallery
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Cut ’n’ Paste: From Architectural Assemblage to Collage City
Jul 10, 2013–Jan 5, 2014
MoMA
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Painting and Sculpture Changes 2013
Jan 1–Dec 31, 2013
MoMA
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Artist’s Choice: Trisha Donnelly
Nov 9, 2012–Jul 28, 2013
MoMA
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Giorgio de Chirico has
111 exhibitionsonline.
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Giorgio de Chirico The Nostalgia of the Infinite Paris 1912-13? (dated on painting 1911)
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Giorgio de Chirico The Anxious Journey Paris, spring-summer 1913
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Giorgio de Chirico Gare Montparnasse (The Melancholy of Departure) Paris, early 1914
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Giorgio de Chirico The Song of Love Paris, June-July 1914
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Giorgio de Chirico The Enigma of a Day Paris, early 1914
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Giorgio de Chirico The Serenity of the Scholar Paris, April-May 1914
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Giorgio de Chirico The Evil Genius of a King Paris 1914-15
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Giorgio de Chirico The Double Dream of Spring Paris, January-May 1915
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Giorgio de Chirico Playthings of the Prince fall 1915
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Giorgio de Chirico The Duo Paris, winter 1914-15
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Giorgio de Chirico The Seer Paris, winter 1914-15
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Giorgio de Chirico The Amusements of a Young Girl late 1915
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Giorgio de Chirico The Mathematicians 1917
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Giorgio de Chirico Great Metaphysical Interior Ferrara, April-August 1917
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Giorgio de Chirico The Condottiere 1917
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Giorgio de Chirico The Faithful Servitor 1916 or 1917
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Giorgio de Chirico Solitude 1917
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Giorgio de Chirico Portrait of Giovinetto Aldo Castelfranco 1920
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Giorgio de Chirico Euripides 1921
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Giorgio de Chirico Le Mystère Laïc: Essai d'Étude Indirecte 1928
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Giorgio de Chirico Hebdomeros from Metamorphosis 1929
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Giorgio de Chirico The Return of the Prodigal Son I (Il Ritorno del Figliol Prodigo I) from Metamorphosis 1929
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Giorgio de Chirico Villa by the Sea (Villa Sul Mare) from Metamorphosis 1929
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Giorgio de Chirico Gladiator (Gladiatore) from Metamorphosis 1929
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Giorgio de Chirico School of the Gladiators II (Scuola di Gladiatori II) from Metamorphosis 1929
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Giorgio de Chirico The Archaeologists IV (Gli Archeologi IV) from Metamorphosis 1929
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Giorgio de Chirico Calligrammes 1930
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Giorgio de Chirico Headpiece (page 15) from Calligrammes 1930
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Giorgio de Chirico Headpiece (page 18) from Calligrammes 1930
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Giorgio de Chirico Headpiece (page 22) from Calligrammes 1930
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Giorgio de Chirico Headpiece (page 38) from Calligrammes 1930
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Giorgio de Chirico Headpiece (page 42) from Calligrammes 1930
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Giorgio de Chirico Headpiece (page 48) from Calligrammes 1930
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Giorgio de Chirico Headpiece (page 51) from Calligrammes 1930
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Giorgio de Chirico Headpiece (page 60) from Calligrammes 1930
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Giorgio de Chirico Headpiece (page 70) from Calligrammes 1930
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Giorgio de Chirico Headpiece (page 71) from Calligrammes 1930
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Giorgio de Chirico Headpiece (page 77) from Calligrammes 1930
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Giorgio de Chirico Headpiece (page 82) from Calligrammes 1930
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Giorgio de Chirico Headpiece (page 84) from Calligrammes 1930
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Giorgio de Chirico Headpiece (page 88) from Calligrammes 1930
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Giorgio de Chirico Headpiece (page 92) from Calligrammes 1930
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Giorgio de Chirico Headpiece (page 94) from Calligrammes 1930
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Giorgio de Chirico Headpiece (page 96) from Calligrammes 1930
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Giorgio de Chirico Headpiece (page 106) from Calligrammes 1930
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Giorgio de Chirico Headpiece (page 108) from Calligrammes 1930
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Giorgio de Chirico Headpiece (page 110) from Calligrammes 1930
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Giorgio de Chirico Headpiece (page 112) from Calligrammes 1930
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