Narrator 1: Gare Montparnasse (The Melancholy of Departure). Painted in 1914 by the artist Giorgio de Chirico, Italian, born in Greece. 1888 to 1978. Oil on canvas, 55 high by 74 inches wide. 140 by 185 centimeters.
Narrator 2: This painting sits within a thin, dark, wood frame. It portrays a stylized urban landscape, rendered like a graphic cartoon, with dark lines outlining the architectural elements. But this is not a familiar image from city life. The scene is dreamlike, with recognizable architectural features juxtaposed against peculiar geometric planes and surfaces. Perspective is used inconsistently, giving the painting a sense of being unsettlingly out of balance.
The center is dominated by a massive structure of columns and arches. The arches are part of a building that fills the left side of the painting and rises beyond its upper edge. The painting’s title reveals this central structure to be a Paris train station, the Gare Montparnasse, and it fills more than half the canvas. It is olive–gray, like unornamented concrete.
Square, featureless columns support a plaza above. Only the railing around two of its edges are seen, one running horizontally along the front of the plaza, and the other receding toward a vanishing point near the upper right corner of the painting. The space beneath this plaza is empty, save for the murky shadows below. That’s part of what makes this painting feel odd and disturbing. It seems to emphasize emptiness – a void that crowds other elements of the painting toward the edges of the canvas.
We will describe these elements, moving clockwise and beginning near the top of the painting where the sky fades from yellow at the horizon to a dark blue–green at the top edge of the painting. Just to the right of center, a red brick clock tower sits atop the plaza. It’s about 10 inches in height, suggesting that we are seeing it ‘off in the distance’. On its roof are seven narrow flags of yellow, red, white and green. A strong wind blows them to the left. They almost touch the top edge of the painting. The hands on the clock’s white face read 1:27, but the scene does not seem to be either mid–day or night. Rather, the light of the yellow, green and blue sky, and the long shadows make it seem closer to dawn or dusk.
Continuing to the right, there is a small black silhouette of a train far off in the distance with smoke rising from its engine. The wind that blows the flags does not seem to affect the puff of white smoke that rises vertically above the horizon. A long geometric plane runs diagonally down from the train to the foreground, where it broadens abruptly. It is ocher in color, brownish–yellow. Two tiny figures stand near the top of this impossibly steep ramp, casting long shadows. They are painted indistinctly and only an inch or so high, implying that they too are at a great distance.
At the bottom right corner sit a bunch of green bananas. They rest inexplicably on a surface of red bricks. They seem jarringly large—out of proportion to other elements within the scene. At the lower left and reaching three–quarters of the way up the canvas a series of 10 thin vertical stripes might indicate the siding of a small building; dark red, dirty white, ocher.
Near the top left of the painting another distant group of narrow flags fly from a black pole above the train station – yellow, white and red – one above another, blowing to the left in the wind.