A museum of strangeness

In an age of lockdowns, we remember Giorgio de Chirico's haunting metaphysical images of abandoned streets and uprooted cities.

Only a few artists in history have been able to create so strange and so original a world as Giorgio de Chirico,” wrote American critic and collector, James Thrall Soby. “A world of silent architecture, of cold light and haunted shadow, timeless, airless and peopled by enigmatic automata.”

De Chirico’s images, particularly those created between 1910 and 1920 and grouped as ‘metaphysical paintings’, conveyed unique and brilliant visual formations through haunting images of dreamlike townscapes with intentionally subverted spaces, and long sinister shadows. Included in them was a disturbing juxtaposition of hackneyed everyday objects, which intensified the mood of elegiac loneliness and desolation. “De Chirico’s metaphysical cityscapes are not timeless, but rather untimely; they are not eternal, but eternally recurring,” wrote an observer.

In his 1919 essay, ‘We Metaphysicians’, de Chirico explained: “It is the tranquil and senseless beauty of matter that appears to me ‘metaphysical,’ and even more metaphysical to me are all those objects which, in the precision of their colour and the exactness of their dimensions, represent the antipodes of all confusion and nebulousness… As far as I am concerned, there is more mystery in a fossilized piazza in the clarity of midday than in a dark room in the heart of the night, during a spiritual séance.”

De Chirico (1888-1978) was still in his twenties when he created some of his iconic paintings in Paris between 1911 and 1915, where he supposedly worked in isolation and poor health. His images immediately attracted the attention of important figures. In 1913, influential French writer, and a forefather of Surrealism, Guillaume Apollinaire, called him “the most astonishing painter of his time.”

De Chirico’s images played a major role in the development of surrealism in the 1920s. His painting, The Dream of Tobias (1917), was picked up by critic André Breton to be on the very first cover of the journal La Révolution surréaliste in 1924. His works as well as his philosophical and artistic views influenced many major artists, including Giorgio Morandi and Rene Magritte. In fact, Magritte is said to have broken out in tears when he saw de Chirico’s ‘The Song of Love’ (1915), later claiming it as the most emotional moment of his life.

De Chirico (whose first painting was a still life of lemons) openly acknowledged the influence of German philosopher and thinker Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) on his metaphysical work. “I will now whisper something in your ear,” he wrote in his letter to a friend in January 1910. “I am the only man to have truly understood Nietzsche — all of my work demonstrates this.”

Historians have noted that in several of his early paintings and writings, de Chirico transcribed Nietzschean passages almost literally; and incorporated esoteric symbols, spaces, structures, and spectral statues mentioned by Nietzsche. The Greece-born Italian painter also related to the Nietzschean idea of signs and omens hidden beneath the banal.

After 1920, however, de Chirico’s art underwent numerous changes when he turned his back on the avant-garde; got re-enamoured by Greco-Roman myth and history; and began copying old masters’ paintings. By 1930, he was immersed fully into a classical style of painting and continued in the same vein for the rest of his career. More significantly, he renounced his early works, and became a virulent critic of modernism. He scorned at the ‘so‐called masterpieces of Braque and Matisse and other authors of malodorous works.’ He also fell out with surrealists whom he branded as ‘cretinous and hostile’; and asserted that Dali had “the brain of a little chicken.” By 1928, the surrealists who had earlier hailed him as a visionary, were denouncing de Chirico as a ‘dead painter.’

A life in contradictions

De Chirico, who had received tumultuous adoration for his early work, gradually became a butt of ridicule for his views and artistic output during much of his later years. He made matters worse for himself by proclaiming: “Everything from the baroque down to the present is decadent. But I paint for a living.”

He also gained notoriety as a ‘self-forger’ when he indulged in the scandalous practice of reproducing his more popular early compositions; he backdated the canvases, ostensibly to sell them for high sums. He even supposedly condemned some of his genuine early paintings as forgeries because he was jealous of the high prices they were commanding. He famously claimed that there were hundreds of his forged paintings hanging in the best collections across the world.

Among his other obsessions was painting himself; he is said to have painted at least 70 self-portraits, often in ludicrous poses and costumes. Some commentators point out that de Chirico actually relished the part of provocateur. “His prickly behaviour can be reassessed today as a calculated performance,” says Luca Massimo Barbero, who curated de Chirico’s retrospective exhibition in Milan in 2019-20. “He was having a lot of fun provoking (the art world).”

When de Chirico died of a heart attack on 20 November 1978 in Rome, he was 90. He had lived a long life peppered by provocative utterances, incidents, and interactions. He famously claimed that numerically he had more enemies than the stars in the sky. “One must picture everything in the world as an enigma,” he once wrote, “and live in the world as if in a vast museum of strangeness.”