Giorgio de Chirico (Volos, Greece, July 10, 1888 - Rome, November 20, 1978), was an Italian painter. He was part of the movement called metaphysical painting, considered a precursor of Surrealism.
Giorgio de Chirico's Biography
After studying in Greece and Munich he settled in Paris, where he established a strong friendship with Apollinaire. In the early 1920s, his work achieved considerable success in avant-garde circles, and in 1925 he participated in the first surrealist exhibition. Later, and to general surprise, he is exalted by a vacuum academism that he cultivates for 30 years.
Giorgio de Chirico's metaphilistic painting anticipates elements that later appear in Surrealist painting: architectural patterns, large bare spaces, anonymous mannequins, and dreamlike environments. From Dadaism, the Surrealist painters, and with them De Chirico, directly inherit the destructive and nihilistic attitudes.
What the artist himself calls "metaphysical painting" corresponds to surrealism's own need for dreams, mystery and eroticism. And so, ever since this movement saw the light, De Chirico's work has met with considerable success.
Among his most paradigmatic works are The Return of the Poet, Apollinaire's Premonitory Portrait, The Philosopher's Conquest, Hector and Andromache, and The Restless Muses.
Metaphysical Painting
Italian historical current, which is defined from the meeting between Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) and Carlo Carrà (1881-1966) in Ferrara, 1917. At this moment, the painters coined the term "metaphysical painting", which gave its title to several of their publications.
De Chirico had already been rehearsing the new style since 1910 (The Riddle of the Oracle, 1910 and The Tower, 1911-1912), in a decisive refusal of Futurism, both its formal solutions and the political and nationalist ideology that supported the movement. De Chirico's art already presents a metaphysical face: it places itself as outside temporality, as a negation of the present, of natural and social reality.
Nothing could be further from the futurist motivations, which yearn for the acceleration of time and the transformation of society. Less than interpreting or altering reality, De Chirico's painting is aimed at an "other reality", metaphysical, beyond history. The scenarios designed by the painter between 1910 and 1915 allow us to see the contours of the new style, which will be consolidated between 1917 and 1920.
The architectural elements mobilized in the compositions - columns, towers, squares, neoclassical monuments, factory chimneys, etc. - paradoxically construct a new style of painting. - paradoxically construct empty and mysterious spaces.
The human figures, when present, carry with them a strong feeling of loneliness and silence. They are half-man, half-statues, seen from the back or from very far away. It is almost impossible to see faces, only silhouettes and shadows, projected by bodies and buildings.
Italian painter, like Carlo Carrà, the movement called Metaphysical Painting. The mystery, the dream, the empty spaces, the shadows, the unexpected perspectives, the juxtapositions found in De Chirico's work influenced the Surrealist artists.
In De Chirico's paintings, objects seem to have no meaning; in the enigmatic he is representing the world of dreams and the unconscious. Although he was considered a precursor, De Chirico repudiated his surreal work and, beginning in 1925, began to paint within a more traditional style.
Works of Giorgio de Chirico
The atmosphere is one of melancholy and enigma which the titles of the works reaffirm: The Enigma of the Hour (1912), Melancholy of a Beautiful Afternoon (1913), Piazza d'Italia and Autumnal Melancholy (1915).
The incorporation of elements present in the still lifes - gloves, balls, fruit, cookies, etc. - reinforce the idea of displacement and the feeling of unreality that surrounds the works: the pieces do not articulate, but seem to repel each other (O Sonho Transformado, 1913).
Between 1914 and 1915, mannequins begin to populate the painter's universe, and are widely explored from then on: The Unquiet Muses (1916), Heitor and Andromache (1917). Halfway between man, robot, and statue (or would that be columns?), the mannequins emphasize the enigmatic character and dreamlike sense of De Chirico's constructions.
But, before any other sense they may acquire, they are geometric shapes, evidencing the coordinated rulers and lines that surround and define the mannequins' bodies.
These same instruments of measurement and construction - compasses, squares, and rulers - inhabit the painter's metaphysical scenarios (see The Philosopher and the Poet, 1915 and The Astronomer - the Anxiety of Life, 1915).
In Brazil, Edições 100/cabeças publishes "Hebdômeros", a narrative written by the painter in 1929. Translation by Flávia Falleiros. Presentation by Laurens Vancrevel and afterword by Marcus Rogério Salgado. ISBN 9786587451091 2022.
Its sources
The sources of De Chirico's metaphysical inventions, iconography, and displaced reality are the philosophies of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Weininger, as well as the morbid images of Swiss painter Arnold Böcklin (1827-1901) and the fantastic elements of the etchings of artist Max Klinger (1857-1920).
Some interpreters also point to the classical culture of Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) and Claude Lorrain (1604-1682), and the Romanticism of German painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) as the matrix of De Chirico's painting.
An active participant in Futurism, Carrà adheres to metaphysical poetics in 1917 (The Hermaphrodite Idol, The Metaphysical Muse, and The Enchanted Room).
In his stylistic research, there is an emphasis on the questioning of form - which he aims to simplify - and the intention of recovering the integrity of objects, which finds support in the group of artists gathered around the journal Valori Plastici (1818-1921). In works such as The Oval of the Apparitions (1918) and Penelope (1919), Cubist marks are more clearly perceived in Carrà's painting, an inspiration he acknowledges on several occasions.
Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) adheres a little later, and for a short time, to metaphysical painting, as the still lifes produced between 1918 and 1919 reveal. Other important names in defining the contours of metaphysical painting in Ferrara are the poet and painter Alberto Savinio (1891-1952), De Chirico's brother, and the painter and writer Filippo de Pisis (1896-1956).
From 1922, suggestions of metaphysical painting are incorporated by artists linked to the Novecento, among them Mario Sironi (1885-1961).
The unusual approximation of disparate objects and the concern with the oneiric universe in the art of De Chirico and Carrà will have a strong impact on Dadaism and Surrealism. Two major exhibitions held in Germany in 1921 and 1924, in turn, will leave echoes in the New Objectivity, especially in Max Beckmann's version (1884-1950).
Giorgio de Chirico's Influence on Brazilian painters
In Brazil, some critics locate influences of metaphysical painting in works by Hugo Adami (1899-1999), Tarsila do Amaral (1886-1973), Di Cavalcanti (1897-1976), Candido Portinari (1903-1962), Milton Dacosta (1915-1988) and Ismael Nery (1900-1934). Later in the metaphysical phase Iberê Camargo (1914-1994) studied with De Chirico.