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WORLDS TOP ARTISTS
For top creative practitioners, see:
Best Artists of All Time.
For the greatest view painters, see:
Best Landcape Artists.
For the greatest still life art, see:
Best Still Life Painters.
For the greatest portraitists
see: Best Portrait Artists.
For the greatest genre-painting, see:
Best Genre Painters.
For the top allegorical painting,
see: Best History Painters.
WORLD'S BEST ART
For a list of the best examples of
Fine Art Painting, by the
world's top artists, see below:
Greatest Paintings Ever
Oils, watercolours, mixed
media from 1300-present.
Oil Painting
History, styles and development.
WHAT IS ART?
For an explanation of the
aesthetic issues surrounding
the creative visual arts, see:
Art Definition, Meaning
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Biography
Born in Vola, Greece, to a Sicilian father
and Genovese mother, he began studying art in Athens in 1900. In 1906
his parents moved to Munich, where de Chirico enrolled in the Academy
of Fine Arts and came under the influence of late-19th-century German
philosophers, such as Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer, the irrational
symbolist painter Arnold Bocklin (1827-1901) and the nightmarish etchings
of Max Klinger (1857-1920). This encouraged him to reject naturalism and
to concentrate instead on poetic, imaginary, and visionary subjects. In
1909 the family moved to Milan where de Chirico painted mythological scenes
closely based on work by Bocklin.
Early Works
De Chirico's first characteristic works date from 1910-11. Subject to
illness and depression, haunted by the writings of Nietzsche and by nostalgic
recollections of Greece and Italy, and a prey to hallucinatory revelations,
de Chirico began portraying a mysterious and troubling world which was
for him as real as the banal world of everyday life. Leaving Milan in
early 1910, he moved to Florence where he completed the first of his "Metaphysical
Town Square" series, The Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon, following
a revelation he experienced in Piazza Santa Croce. Another Florentine
work was The Enigma of the Oracle. Leaving Florence in the summer
of 1911, he travelled to Paris, spending a few days in Turin, the city
of Nietzsche, whose arcaded buildings, statues, and desolate squares affected
him deeply.
Paris
Arriving in the French capital in July
1911, he joined his brother Andrea De Chirico who introduced him to Pierre
Laprade, a member of the selection-jury at the Salon d'Automne,
where he showed his paintings - Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon (1910),
Enigma of the Oracle (1910), and also Self-Portrait (1911).
In 1913 he exhibited works at both the Salon d'Automne and the
Salon des Independants which were noticed by Pablo
Picasso as well as the influential art critic Guillaume Apollinaire.
All this led to his first sale - that of
his painting The Red Tower (1913; Peggy Guggenheim Collection,
Venice). In this (and other) work, De Chirico created an unsettling sense
of enigma in images of trance-like stillness and silence. The period of
time is ambiguous, the space impossibly deep, and the perspective inconsistent;
and objects are irrationally juxtaposed, The strangeness is heightened
by the almost naive lucidity of his style. Sometimes spatially agoraphobic,
sometimes claustrophobic, these paintings, with their looming statues
and shadows, are full of tension and menace. They suggest, through an
apparently unconscious symbolism of towers, arcades, and trains, feelings
of panic and sexual frustration. The following year, in 1914, thanks to
Guillaume Apollinaire, he agreed a contract with the art dealer Paul Guillaume.
Italy: La Scuola Metafisica
On the outbreak of World War I, De Chirico
returned to Italy and was drafted into the army. Due to his poor physical
condition he was assigned to the miliary hospital at Ferrara, where he
continued his painting. His work by now showed a debt to Cubism
in the shallowness of the pictorial space, the use of collage-like effects,
and its imagery of abstracted mathematical instruments.
In January 1917, following a nervous breakdown,
he met the Italian painter Carlo Carra (1881-1966) and together they founded
the Metaphysical School (La Scuola Metafisica), whose principles (outlined
in Carra's book Pittura Metafisica, 1919) consisted of a rationalization
of the artistic aims de Chirico had held since 1910-11. Although short-lived
- the pair quarrelled and separated in 1919 - the movement helped to draw
attention to de Chirico's concept of poetic painting, which was to have
a profound effect on such Surrealist painters as Salvador
Dali (1904-89), Max Ernst (1891-1976), Rene
Magritte (1898-1967), and Yves Tanguy (1900-55). Indeed, it was during
the late 1920s, when Surrealism began to dominate the art world of the
inter-war years, that De Chirico's international reputation was established,
although chiefly for his pre-1920 output.
Moves Away From Metaphysical Art
After 1917, when he painted masterpieces
like The Disquieting Muses, (Gianni Mattioli Collection, Milan),
de Chirico's work declined, although he created a body of remarkable still
life painting and portrait-art
in 1919, and his work began to be exhibited extensively in Europe. In
1919, he moved to Rome, turned his back on Metaphysical imagery, and became
increasingly concerned with questions of pictorial technique. That autumn
he wrote an article in Valori Plastici entitled "The Return of Craftsmanship",
which proposed a return to traditional methods and iconography in the
style of Old Masters like Raphael
and Signorelli, and became a vociferous opponent of modern art. From this
time onwards, whenever he did return to his early manner, it was to make
copies or pastiches.
In 1924, De Chirico married his first wife,
the Russian ballerina Raissa Gurievich, and relocated to Paris. In 1928,
his reputation buoyed by plaudits from Surrealists, he had his first solo
exhibition in New York and shortly afterwards, London. He wrote essays
on art and other subjects, and in 1929 briefly recaptured the visionary
intensity of his early metaphysical work in his extraordinary novel Hebdomeros.
The following year he got together with Isabella Pakszwer Far, his second
wife, with whom he returned to Italy where they remained together for
the rest of his long life.
Later Works
De Chirico continued painting in a range
of differing classical styles (including a type of Neo-Baroque) for nearly
five decades, until his death in Rome at the age of 89, but these works
never received the same acclaim as those from his pre-1920 metaphysical
period: a situation he deeply resented, as he considered his later work
to be much superior. In 1974, four years before he died, he was elected
a member of the French Academy of Fine Arts.
Reputation
De Chirico's metaphysical art had a major
impact on contemporary and later painters, notably the French-born artist
Yves Tanguy (1900-55), who claimed to have started painting in 1923 after
seeing a De Chirico painting in a gallery window, despite never having
held a brush. Other artists who acknowledged a debt to De Chirico include
Carlo Carra, Max Ernst, Salvador Dali, Giorgio Morandi, Rene Magritte,
and Philip Guston.
Paintings by Giorgio De Chirico
Works by Giorgio De Chirico hang in many
of the world's best art museums, notably
the Tate Collection London, the Museum
of Modern art New York, and the Peggy
Guggenheim Collection, Venice. His paintings are also represented
in a number of prestigious private collections.
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