Giorgio de Chirico
The creator of Metaphysical painting.
Giorgio de Chirico painted deserted squares with long shadows, statues and arcades. The Surrealists saw him as a forerunner.
Giorgio de Chirico was born in 1888 in Volos, Greece, to Italian parents. His father was a railway engineer. He studied art in Athens and then at the Munich Academy. There he was influenced by the Symbolist painter Arnold Böcklin and by the philosophers Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, especially the idea that reality conceals a secret, unsettling meaning.
Around 1910 he began painting what he later called metaphysical pictures. In Paris from 1911 to 1915 he was supported by the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. The pictures show empty Italian squares with arcades, long shadows, statues, trains on the horizon and clocks showing a precise time. Everything is still and clear, yet enigmatic. The Song of Love of 1914, with an antique plaster head and a rubber glove on a wall, is in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
During the First World War he was stationed in Ferrara. There he worked with the painter Carlo Carrà, and together they formulated pittura metafisica, Metaphysical painting. Faceless mannequins now appeared in the pictures, sometimes as couples or as “troubadours”. The rooms fill with scaffolding, maps and biscuits from Ferrara's bakeries.
In the 1920s de Chirico turned away from the modern towards the Old Masters and a classical style of painting. The Surrealists, who had admired him deeply, distanced themselves, and André Breton claimed he had betrayed his art. Later he painted new versions of his early subjects and sometimes backdated them, which has complicated questions of authenticity and dating.
He spent his last decades in Rome, by the Spanish Steps, where his home is now a museum. He died in 1978. His early pictures were of decisive importance for Surrealism and for Magritte, Dalí and Max Ernst, and they also influenced film, architecture and design. His brother Alberto Savinio was a writer, composer and painter.