Giorgio De Chirico

Giorgio De Chirico painter, writer, theatre designer, sculptor and printmaker, and influential pre-Surrealist was born on July 10, 1888, in Volos, the capital of Thessaly, Greece. His both parents were of Italian heritage. His father, named Evaristo De Chirico, was a railroad engineer. His mother, named Gemma Cervetto, was a noblewoman of Genoese origin. His brother, Andrea, was born two years later. The two brothers supported each other through their entire life.

During this time Giorgio, took his first drawing lessons with the Greek painter Mavrudis, in Athens. In 1906, following the death of his father, the De Chirico family moved to Germany where Giorgio attended the Academy of Fine Arts and came into contact with German artistic, literary and philosophical culture. He read Schopenauer, Nietzsche and Weininger, continued studying the Ancients and studied the art of Arnold Böcklin. In 1908 he returned to Italy 

In 1908 De Chirico returned to Italy and was reunited with his family later moving to Florence to be influenced by Giotto and primitive Tuscan painting and architechture. 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. 

 In 1919 he presented his first personal exhibition at Anton Giulio Bragaglia's Art Gallery and published the text "We metaphysicists". That moment marked the beginning for De Chirico of an intense period of exhibitions throughout Europe, particularly in France, while considerable interest in his works also emerged in the United States. De Chirico's painting was appreciated by all the major Dadaist and Surrealist artists and also by the German artists of "Magic Realism", those of the "Bauhaus" and of the "New Objectivity".

 In 1925 he married the Russian dancer Raissa Gurievich Kroll. In 1928 he held his first one man exhibition in New York at the Valentine Gallery and shortly afterwards exhibited in London. He published the novel "Hebdòmeros" in 1929. Indeed, in those years, as well as painting, he dedicated himself to writing and also to stage designing for theatrical shows and ballets. He continued to exhibit in the most important art galleries both in Europe and America and met Isabella Far, who was to become his second wife in 1952. A few months after his ninetieth birthday, on 20th November 1978, Giorgio De Chirico died in Rome. His remains are conserved in the Monumental Church of St. Francis at Ripa, in Rome.

Great Metaphysical Interior

In De Chirico’s paintings of this period, the colours are brighter and assume a mysterious significance within enigmatic landscapes and interiors. He believed symbols of a superior reality are often to be seen in geometric forms, that is why he used the geometric shapes of triangles, and squares. He believed the triangle is a mystical and magical symbol, and that it awakens a sense of uneasiness and even fear in the onlooker. Chirico believed the square as a similar symbolic and vital pictorial element: “The square has always obsessed my mind. I always saw squares rising like mysterious stars behind every one of my pictorial representations.” 

De Chirico was impressed by the appearance of Ferrara, one of the most beautiful cities in Italy. What struck him most of all and inspired him on the metaphysical side, were certain aspects of Ferrara interiors, certain windows, shops, houses, districts, such as the ancient ghetto, where you could find certain sweets and biscuits with remarkable metaphysical and strange shapes. 

The large building in this painting represents vivid and emotional experiences that greatly affected him during this period—the army, his health, and the injustices of war, fur filling the role of a hospital. The geometric disposition of forms seems related to the sketches and mechanical drawing instruments from the artist's personal associations of his father Evariste de Chirico, who was an engineer by profession.

At first glance it seems that you are not sure what you are looking at. The artwork is giving you a few aspects of these realistic objects but they are not clearly defined. it is perplexing to a certain extent, the objects are like strange props in a play. Metaphysical means; beyond the physical, very abstract, something in the imagination that may not exist in reality, this defies the artwork making the title true. I believe the work is the different characteristics of the town De Chirico painted, Ferrara. The artwork is also painted on a personal level with connections to his father (whom had passed), his health (which was not in the best state), and the war.

Giorgio used the element of dislocation, taking an object from its usual environment and placing it in an unfamiliar one. He did this with the two parallel baguettes on the blue print in the upstanding box. It is said to be connected to the bakery's of Ferrara, impacting my understanding of surrealism through such meaning behind something to disconnected seeming irrelevant to the rest of the artwork.

The artwork is juxtaposed. He places totally different objects; draftsmen tools, food (baguettes), boxes, and an artwork on an easel, and places them together for comparison. This proves to show how the artwork presents itself to be dreamlike, impacting on my understanding.

This links to another element Georgio uses, Incongruity. The artwork lacks appropriateness with the two parallel baguettes amongst the draftsmen tools. This has impacted my understanding of the topic because it makes the impossible seem possible. To the viewer it seems inharmonious but to the artist it tells a compatible, personal story.