Giorgio de Chirico

The Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978), acclaimed by the surreallists as a forerunner of their movement, founded the school of metaphysical painting.

Giorgio de Chirico was born on July 10, 1888, in Volos, Greece, the son of an engineer from Palermo. The family settled in Athens, where De Chirico studied art at the Polytechnic Institute. His earliest works were landscapes and seascapes.

After the death of his father in 1905 De Chirico, attracted by the German neoromantic school of painting, moved to Munich. There he saw the paintings of Arnold Böcklin and discovered the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, which exercised a great influence on him.

The attraction of Böcklin for De Chirico is best understood from the artist's own words: "Böcklin knew how to create an entire world of his own of a surprising lyricism, combining the preternaturalism of the Italian landscape with architectural elements." De Chirico also spoke of the metaphysical power with which "Böcklin always springs from the precision and clarity of a definite apparition." These statements describe the characteristics of De Chirico's own art.

In 1909 De Chirico went to Italy. The following year he began to execute the paintings that became characteristic of his style, such as the Enigma of the Oracle and the Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon. This style he developed further in Paris between 1911 and 1915, where he worked in isolation and in poor health. When he exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in 1913, Guillaume Apollinaire called him "the most astonishing painter of his time."

De Chirico had to return to Italy for his military service and was stationed in Ferrara (1915-1918). The architecture of that city, with its far perspectives, deepened his sense of the mysterious. In 1917 he met the painter Carlo Carrà at the military hospital in Ferrara, and they launched the metaphysical school (Scuola Metafisica) of painting, which attempted to create a new order of reality based on metaphysics. Giorgio Morandi, Ardengo Soffici, Filippo de Pisis, Alberto Savinio (De Chirico's brother), and Mario Sironi soon became members of the circle.

Characteristics of His Art

The art of De Chirico centers upon the antithesis between classical culture and modern mechanistic civilization. These two elements are locked in a desperate struggle, and the tragic quality of this situation exudes an aura of melancholy of which De Chirico is a prime exponent. The iconographic elements of his early art—modern railways and clock towers combined with ancient architecture—are to be sought in the artist's childhood memories of Greece. For the strange visual images in which De Chirico cast his mature works (1911-1918), he used an airless dreamlike space in his townscapes with an exaggerated perspective artificially illuminated, with long sinister shadows, and strewn about with antique statues. There is an elegiac loneliness too (the Delights of the Poet, 1913) and the disturbing juxtaposition of such banal everyday objects as biscuits and rubber gloves with those of mythical significance. And De Chirico's new man has no face; he is a dummy (Hector and Andromache, 1917).

A favorite amusement of ancient Greece was the composition of enigmas. In De Chirico's art they symbolize an endangered transitional period of European culture. From the enigma to the riddle presented by one's dream life is but a short step.

Late Works

De Chirico moved to Rome in 1918, and on the occasion of an exhibition that year he was hailed as a great avant-garde master. A year later he became one of the leaders of Valori Plastici, a group of painters espousing traditional plastic values which dominated the artistic scene in Italy at that time. In 1919 an exhibition of De Chirico's works in Berlin made a deep impression on the central European Dadaists. Between 1920 and 1924 his art underwent numerous fluctuations.

In 1925 De Chirico returned to Paris, where the French proclaimed him one of the masters of surrealism. He, however, had quarreled with the Dadaists and surrealists (he corresponded intensely between 1920 and 1925 with Paul éluard and André Breton) and had left this stage of his development far behind.

In Paris, De Chirico designed scenery and costumes for the Ballets Suédois and the Ballets Monte Carlo and began to paint a series of ruins, wild horses, and gladiators. After 1929, the year in which he published a strange dream novel, Hebdomeros, he changed his style entirely, renounced his adherence to the modern movement, and from then on, living in Rome, became not only a fierce critic of modernism but an academic painter of neoclassic character. He died in 1978.

Further Reading

James Thrall Soby, Giorgio de Chirico (1955), is a searching and comprehensive study of De Chirico's life, work, and philosophy. Isabella Far, Giorgio de Chirico (1953), has a text in Italian and English. See also James T. Soby and Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Twentieth-Century Italian Art (1949), and Massimo Carrà, ed., Metaphysical Art (1970). De Chirico's novel, Hebdomeros, is discussed in J. H. Matthews, Surrealism and the Novel (1966). □

Chirico, Giorgio de (1888–1978). Italian painter, sculptor, designer, and writer, the originator of Metaphysical Painting. He was born at Volo in Greece, the son of a railway engineer who was working there, and had an old-fashioned training at the Athens Polytechnic, 1903–5, followed by a year at the Academy in Florence, 1905–6. When his father died in 1906 his mother moved the family to Munich for the sake of her sons' education; Giorgio studied at the Academy and his brother, who later adopted the name Alberto Savinio, continued his musical training under the composer Max Reger. De Chirico found the instruction at the Academy boring, but he was influenced by the Symbolist work of Max Klinger and the Swiss painter Arnold Böcklin (1827–1901), 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. In 1911 he joined his brother in Paris, where he lived until 1915, 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. In order to empty the objects of his paintings of their natural emotional significance he painted tailors' dummies as human beings (from 1914)—an innovation in which he was influenced by his brother.

In 1915 de Chirico (with his brother) 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 sea-shores 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 work had become repetitive and obsessed with technical refinement. He produced numerous replicas and variants of his early work, sometimes unscrupulously passing them off as earlier originals (which led to considerable controversy and more than one lawsuit). His other work included a number of small sculptures (mainly from the last decade of his life) 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).

Edward Lucie-Smith writes (Lives of the Great Twentieth Century Artists, 1986): ‘For many years de Chirico was treated as if he had died somewhere around 1922. Just before his death in 1978, however, the attitude of part of the avant-garde began to change, and there was a tendency to celebrate him as a premature Post-Modernist and to discover hidden ironies in work that had previously been discussed as vulgar and shameless. If he intended his late paintings to be ironic, de Chirico never admitted it. The claims he made for himself in his second volume of memoirs … were more self-applauding than ever.’ In the catalogue of the exhibition ‘Italian Art in the 20th Century’ (Royal Academy, London, 1989) Wieland Schmied underlines this sense of ambivalence: ‘Giorgio de Chirico remains among the most controversial of all twentieth-century artists. There is no other figure of such seminal importance on whom the experts' opinions are so divided or their interpretations so widely divergent.’

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.

Chirico, Giorgio de (1888–1978). Italian painter, sculptor, designer, and writer, the originator of Metaphysical Painting. He was born in Greece, and 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 tailors' dummies and statues in place of human beings (from 1914). In 1915 he 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).

Giorgio de Chirico , 1888-1978, Italian painter, b. Vólos, Greece. Chirico developed his enigmatic vision in Munich and Italy and from 1911 to 1915 he worked and exhibited in Paris. His powerful, disturbing paintings employ steep perspective, mannequin figures, empty space, and forms used out of context to create an atmosphere of mystery and loneliness. His work exercised a considerable influence on early surrealist painters but was never successfully imitated. In Ferrara, Chirico developed what he termed metaphysical painting, in which he consciously exploited the symbolism of his art. Chirico is represented in leading galleries throughout the world.

Bibliography: See his memoirs (tr. 1972); studies by J. T. Soby (1955, repr. 1967) and I. Far (tr. 1971).

Chirico, Giorgio de (1888–1978) Italian painter, b. Greece. Chirico was founder of the quasi-surrealist ‘metaphysical painting’ movement. He painted still lifes and empty, dream-like landscapes in exaggerated perspective. In the 1930s he repudiated all modern art in favour of paintings in the style of the Old Masters. See also surrealism

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Giorgio De Chirico see Chirico, Giorgio de .

de Chirico, Giorgio. See Chirico.