Chirico, Giorgio de

Chirico, Giorgio de (b Volos, Greece, 10 July 1888; d Rome, 20 Nov. 1978). Italian painter, sculptor, designer, and writer, the originator of Metaphysical Painting. He trained in Athens, Florence, and Munich, where he was influenced by the Symbolist work of Böcklin and Klinger, with their juxtaposition of the commonplace and the fantastic. In 1909 he moved to Italy (dividing his time between Florence, Milan, and Turin) and there painted his first ‘enigmatic’ pictures, which convey an atmosphere of strangeness and uneasiness through their empty spaces, illogical shadows, and unexpected perspectives. From 1911 to 1915 he lived in Paris, becoming friendly with many members of the avant-garde, including Apollinaire (who championed his work) and Picasso. During this period he developed a more deliberate theory of ‘metaphysical insight’ into a reality behind ordinary things by neutralizing the things themselves of all their usual associations and setting them in new and mysterious relationships. To help empty the objects in his paintings of their natural emotional significance he depicted statues and faceless tailors' dummies in place of human beings (from 1914).

In 1915 de Chirico was conscripted into the Italian army and sent to Ferrara. There he suffered a nervous breakdown, and in 1917 met Carrà in the military hospital and converted him to his views, launching Metaphysical Painting as a movement. It was short-lived, virtually ending when de Chirico and Carrà quarrelled in 1919, but it was highly influential on Surrealism, and it was during the later 1920s, when Surrealism was becoming the most talked-about artistic phenomenon of the day, that de Chirico's international reputation was established. However, it was his early work that the Surrealists admired and they attacked him for adopting a more traditional style in the 1920s, when his output included some distinctive pictures featuring horses on unreal seashores with broken classical columns. In the 1920s and 1930s he spent much of his time in Paris (and in 1935–7 he lived in the USA) before settling permanently in Rome in 1944. By this time his paintings had become repetitive and obsessed with technical refinement. His other work included a number of small sculptures and set and costume designs for opera and ballet; his writings include a Surrealistic novel, Hebdomeros (1929), and two volumes of autobiography (1945 and 1960) translated into English as The Memoirs of Giorgio de Chirico (1971).

His brother Alberto Savinio (1891–1952), originally Andrea de Chirico, was a musician, writer, painter, and designer; he adopted his pseudonym to avoid confusion with Giorgio, with whom he worked closely for a time (they lived together in Paris, 1911–15). Savinio's work as a painter was rather heavy-handed, but his ideas helped inspire his brother's use of faceless mannequins.