De Chirico Metafisico

DE CHIRICO METAFISICO

Encyclopedia Britannica’s take on Pittura Metafisica:

“Metaphysical painting, style of painting that flourished mainly between 1911 and 1920 in the works of the Italian artists Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà. These painters used representational but incongruous imagery to produce disquieting effects on the viewer. Their work strongly influenced the Surrealists in the 1920s.

“…Metaphysical painting originated with de Chirico. In Munich, Germany, where he spent his formative years, de Chirico was attracted to 19th-century German Romantic painting and to the works of the philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. The latter’s search for hidden meanings beyond surface appearances and his descriptions of empty squares surrounded by arcaded buildings in the Italian city of Turin made a particularly deep impression on de Chirico.

“…The Metaphysical school proved short-lived; it came to an end about 1920 because of dissension between de Chirico and Carrà over who had founded the group. After 1919 de Chirico produced weaker images, lacking the mysterious power of his earlier work, and his painting style eventually sank into an eccentric Classicism.”

See: https://www.britannica.com/art/Metaphysical-painting

—The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica, “Metaphysical Painting”

If you examine de Chirico’s career over the decades, it’s apparent that after setting forth his original vision, he didn’t develop much beyond it, sinking into what the Britannica article has described as “an eccentric Classicism.”

To best appreciate de Chirico, I would say we have to view his entire oeuvre in one go and without regard to the passage of his long lifetime—he lived until 90. Doubtlessly, he successfully propounded an original and influential vision, and he is rightly hailed as one of the progenitors of Surrealism.

De Chirico liked to plant mannequins inside his eerie landscapes as if they were sentient, not lifeless. This 1940 painting shows us a mannequin assembled from oddly fabricated objects and geometric odds and ends. It is an unsettling work of imagination, dreamlike.

The Troubadour (1940)

The Two Masks (1926) confronts us with two mannequin heads graced by weird geometric objects. Most disquieting is the first head—it looks out of two oddly shaped holes like eyes and wears a shiny wig. In this painting de Chirico revisits everyday objects—mannequins and wigs—inviting us to contemplate an alternate reality that possibly exists.

The Two Masks (1926)

Turin Spring (1914) is an early painting. The perspective is exaggerated, the light eerie, the building dark and vacant, the oddest objects are juxtaposed—a clenched glove, a faceless book, the silhouette of an equine statue, and of all things, an egg casting an improbably attenuated shadow. The shadow is recapitulated on the right side of the painting, the source of which is occult. An artichoke—at least it looks like one—peeks out of the lower left corner. Queer…inventive…effective.

Turin Spring (1914)