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Giorgio
de Chirico July 10, 1888 – November 20, 1978) was a Greek-born Italian artist.
In the years before World War I, he founded the scuola metafisica art movement,
which profoundly influenced the surrealists.
Metaphysical
art (Italian: Pittura metafisica), was a style of painting that flourished
mainly between 1911 and 1920 mostly in the works of de Chirico and Carlo Carrà.
The movement began with Chirico, whose dreamlike works with sharp contrasts of
light and shadow often had a vaguely threatening, mysterious quality, 'painting
that which cannot be seen'.De Chirico, his younger brother Alberto Savinio, and
Carrà formally established the school and its principles in 1917.
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While
Futurism staunchly rejected the past, other modern movements identified a
nostalgia for the now faded Classical grandeur of Italy as a major influence in
their art. Giorgio de Chirico first developed the style that he later called
Metaphysical Painting while in Milan.
It
was in the more sedate surroundings of Florence, however, that he subsequently
developed his emphasis on strange, eerie spaces, based upon the Italian piazza.
Many of de Chirico's works from his Florence period evoke a sense of
dislocation between past and present, between the individual subject and the
space he or she inhabits. These works soon drew the attention of other artists
such as Carlo Carrà and Giorgio Morandi.
In
1917, in the midst of the First World War, Carrà and de Chirico spent time in
Ferarra where they further developed the Metaphysical Painting style that was
later to attract the attention of the French Surrealists. 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, he became interested in traditional painting techniques, and worked in a
neoclassical or neo-Baroque style, while frequently revisiting the metaphysical
themes of his earlier work.
In
the early 1920s, the Surrealist writer André Breton discovered one of De
Chirico's metaphysical paintings on display in Paul Guillaume's Paris gallery,
and was enthralled.
Numerous
young artists who were similarly affected by De Chirico's imagery became the
core of the Paris Surrealist group centered around Breton. In 1924 De Chirico
visited Paris and was accepted into the group, although the surrealists were
severely critical of his post-metaphysical work.
De
Chirico met and married his first wife, the Russian ballerina Raissa Gurievich
in 1925, and together they moved to Paris. His relationship with the
Surrealists grew increasingly contentious, as they publicly disparaged his new
work; by 1926 he had come to regard them as "cretinous and hostile".
They soon parted ways in acrimony. In 1928 he held his first exhibition in New
York City and shortly afterwards, London. He wrote essays on art and other
subjects, and in 1929 published a novel entitled Hebdomeros, the Metaphysician.
In
1930, De Chirico met his second wife, Isabella Pakszwer Far, a Russian, with
whom he would remain for the rest of his life. Together they moved to Italy in
1932, finally settling in Rome in 1944. In 1948 he bought a house near the
Spanish Steps which is now a museum dedicated to his work.
In
1939, he adopted a neo-Baroque style influenced by Rubens.[6] De Chirico's
later paintings never received the same critical praise as did those from his
metaphysical period. He resented this, as he thought his later work was better
and more mature. He nevertheless produced backdated "self-forgeries"
both to profit from his earlier success, and as an act of revenge—retribution
for the critical preference for his early work.[8] He also denounced many
paintings attributed to him in public and private collections as forgeries.
He
remained extremely prolific even as he approached his 90th year. In 1974 he was
elected to the French Académie des Beaux-Arts. He died in Rome on November 20,
1978.