GIORGIO DE CHIRICO SURREAL LANDSCAPES

HIS LIFE: 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. 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. He was born in Volos, Greece, to a Genovese mother and a Sicilian father. After studying art in Athens and Florence, De Chirico moved to Germany in 1906, following his father's death in He entered the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. He returned to Italy in the summer of 1909 and spent six months in Milan. At the beginning of 1910, he moved to Florence where he painted the first of his 'Metaphysical Town Square' series, The Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon, after the revelation he felt in Piazza Santa Croce. De Chirico was profoundly moved by what he called the 'metaphysical aspect' of Turin: the architecture of its archways and piazzas. De Chirico moved to Paris in July At the outbreak of the First World War, he returned to Italy. Upon his arrival in May 1915, he enlisted in the Italian army, but he was considered unfit for work and assigned to the hospital at Ferrara. He continued to paint, and in 1918, he transferred to Rome. From 1918 his work was exhibited extensively in Europe.

De Chirico met and married his first wife, the Russian Ballerina Raissa Gurievich in 1925, and together they moved to Paris.[7] His relationship with the Surrealists grew increasingly contentious, 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 In 1948 he bought a house near the Spanish Steps which is now a museum dedicated to his work. 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, His brother, Andrea de Chirico, who became famous as Alberto Savinio, was also a writer and a painter.

HIS WORK: De Chirico is best known for the paintings he produced between 1909 and 1919, his metaphysical period, which are memorable for the haunted, brooding moods evoked by their images. At the start of this period, his subjects were still cityscapes inspired by the bright daylight of Mediterranean cities, but gradually he turned his attention to studies of cluttered storerooms, sometimes inhabited by mannequin- like hybrid figures. In autumn, 1919, De Chirico published an article in Valori Plastici entitled "The Return of Craftsmanship", in which he advocated a return to traditional methods and iconography. This article heralded an abrupt change in his artistic orientation, as he adopted a classicizing manner inspired by such old masters as Raphael and Signorelli, and became an outspoken opponent of modern art. 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, and they parted in bad terms. 'That de Chirico was a poet, and a great one, is not in dispute. He could condense voluminous feeling through metaphor and association (…)’. He resembles his more representational American contemporary, Edward Hopper: their pictures' low sunlight, their deep and often irrational shadows, their empty walkways and portentous silences creating an enigmatic visual poetry.

METAPHYSICAL ART Metaphysical art was a style of painting that flourished mainly between 1911 and 1920 in the works of the Italian artists Giorgio 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.

Love Song

Melancholy

The Disquieting Muses

Hector and Andromache

Mystery and Melancholy of a Street