An exhibition spanning the life's work of Georgio Chirico throws new light on this sometimes impenetrable forefather of surrealism, writes LARA MARLOWEin Paris
GIORGIO DE CHIRICO entitled one of his first self-portraits: And what shall I love, if not the enigma? The forefather of surrealism would become the most famous Italian painter of the 20th century. But 31 years after he died, aged 90, Chirico remains an enigma. We don’t know what, if anything, his haunting paintings of deserted piazzas mean. Chirico’s metaphysical paintings, as he called them, convey alienation, the unease of a disturbing dream; a silent tribute to the incredible strangeness of being.
The intense, variegated skies, Italianate architecture, statues and shadows of Chirico’s metaphysical paintings long ago entered our universal museum. I suspect the US president is a Chirico fan. Describing his first trip to Europe in Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama writes: “I crossed the Plaza Mejor at high noon, with its de Chirico shadows and sparrows swirling across cobalt skies . . .” There is no rhyme or reason to Chirico’s shadows. In Metaphysical Interior (with Big Factory), (1916), shadows slant in several directions. Chirico has many ways of disorienting us: incongruous juxtapositions, for example the branch of bananas next to a Venus de Milo-like sculpture in The Poet’s Uncertainty, (1913); the multiple vanishing points in Gare Montparnasse or the Melancholy of Departure (1914).
Nor can anyone explain why an artist of such talent seemingly lost his way in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, painting kitsch still lifes and garish copies of 14th and 15th century Italian masters. These canvases are so embarrassingly bad that museums shunned them and collectors did not want their valuable Chiricos to be shown alongside them. One of the merits of the first major Chirico exhibition in 26 years is that the painter’s entire career – not just those works that found favour – have been brought together in Paris’s museum of modern art.
Chirico was born of Italian parents in Greece in 1888, and began studying art as a teenager in Athens. Allusions to Greek mythology, particularly Ariadne, the Cretan princess, sister of the Minotaur, Theseus’ abandoned lover and wife of Dionysus, abound in his paintings. In Square with Ariadne (1913), her statue reclines parallel to a colonnade, with a train heading towards a tower on the horizon. Ariadne crooks an arm over her head, and bends one knee.
Statue or human? With Chirico, one is never sure. In Morning Meditation (1911-1912), another reclining statue stares at the sea. Statues and humans co-exist, like the living and the dead. A cane rests against a wall. Weeds grow among broken paving stones. If neutron bombs had existed then, you might think you were in the aftermath of a war.
In Chirico’s painting, says Jacqueline Munck, the curator of the exhibition: “Time is a human affair, but it is not reality. He was strongly influenced by Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. Their philosophy inspired him to eliminate what was human, to chosifier everything – turn everything into things.” When Chirico painted himself, he never attempted to improve his weak chin and prominent nose. “The self-portraits are about seeing oneself as someone foreign,” says Munck. In the 1922-24 self-portrait, Chirico painted a bust of himself staring at a Renaissance-like self-image, in three-quarter profile. A beautifully rendered lemon seems to sit on a window-sill before them. It was a turning point, towards realistic, classical painting.
Chirico painted dozens of self-portraits. In the 1940s and 1950s, he portrayed himself in 17th century costume, with velvet breeches and plumed hats. The effect is comical, not unlike the work of the US photographer Cindy Sherman. Was Chirico humorous? Or slightly cracked? In its brutal honesty, Chirico’s 1945 nude self-portrait, in which the painter sits on a chair, clothed only by a loincloth, is reminiscent of Lucian Freud. It is one of the rare Chirico canvases where there is no mystery. “It is the naked portrait of a ruin who was once a genius,” Max Ernst wrote in 1946. “A weak, totally asexual body, falling cheeks and the pallor of a man who is already almost dead. There is something very convincing in this portrait, as if a painter painted his own body after death.”
CHIRICO’S FATHER WAS an engineer who built infrastructure for the Italian national railway. We sense his unhappy grip on the painter in innumerable try squares, T-squares and other draughtsman’s paraphernalia, and in repeated paintings of prodigal sons returning. Chirico often painted his mother and brother; never his father. In The Enigma of a Day (1914), a statue of a father or commander, austere and inaccessible, turns its back to the viewer, gazing towards the horizon.
Chirico suffered from recurring depression and an intestinal ailment. “He turned inward when he was suffering,” says Munck. “It was probably in those moments of isolation that he created distance from himself, the way one distances pain when one feels badly.” More detached than tormented, Chirico said his paintings came to him in “revelations”.
It was in Paris, where he followed his younger brother, also a painter, that Chirico began the metaphysical paintings that made him famous. In 1912, he was “discovered” by the great poet and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire, who called Chirico “the most surprising painter of the young generation.” Writing in L’Intransigeant in October 1913, Apollinaire described the contents of Chirico’s atelier at 115, rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs: “The art of this young painter is an interior, cerebral art which has nothing to do with that of painters who have revealed themselves in recent years.”
In Chirico’s 1914 portrait of Apollinaire, a classical bust wears dark glasses, symbolising the blind poet of antiquity. A fish and seashell are placed incongruously beside the statue. We see Apollinaire only as a black profile, lurking behind these symbols. With eerie premonition, Chirico placed a circle on the poet’s temple, where he would later be wounded by shrapnel in the first World War. In exchange for the painting, Chirico asked Apollinaire to dedicate a poem to him.
Through Apollinaire, Chirico met the luminaries of the pre-first World War art world: Picasso, Derain, Max Jacob, Braque . . . Apollinaire introduced Chirico to the art dealer Paul Guillaume, who contracted to buy six paintings a month, for a total of 120 French francs.
Breton, Eluard and Aragon, the future theoreticians of surrealism, collected Chirico’s works, which were admired by Magritte and Ernst. Years later, as recounted by Ernst, Chirico deliberately provoked Breton, showing him and Giacometti his garish postcard-like paintings of Venice and Naples. When Breton expressed nostalgia for Chirico’s metaphysical paintings, the artist rounded on him: “It’s the easiest thing in the world to do this type of painting, even if there are people who are stupid enough to buy them.” Breton, the “pope” of surrealism, “excommunicated” Chirico.
Chirico and his brother had gone home to join up when Italy entered the first World War in 1915. They were given administrative jobs in Ferrara, whose Renaissance architecture inspired more of Chirico’s metaphysical paintings. Chirico became close friends with another art dealer, Mario Broglio, who described Chirico’s paintings as “a unique example of melancholic and tragic irony”. In Chirico’s hybrid paintings, faceless mannequins sometimes have feet or other human characteristics, but their bodies are, for example, comprised of ancient ruins (The Archeologists 1927). Amputated arms are capped by barbell-like contraptions. In Furniture in a Valley (1927), the two empty armchairs that face each other in the open air seem an allegory for the impossibility of human communication. “Learn to express the hidden voice of things, that is the path and the goal of art,” Chirico wrote in 1938.
THROUGHOUT HIS LIFE, Chirico painted “replays”, copies of works from his metaphysical painting period. This duplication was interpreted as a form of self-destruction, a deliberate attempt to drive down the value of his early paintings.
The later replays, such as Italian Square – the Great Game (1968) have a lighter palette and humorous, cartoon-like quality not present in the original paintings. Fiery suns and crescent moons appear, linked by cables to fires or shadows.
Chirico’s self-derision is evident in The Return of Ulysses (1968). The Greek hero, his alter ego, rows on a sea the size of a bedroom carpet, surrounded by parquet floor, chairs and a wardrobe. He has travelled the world, and ends up in a bourgeois bedroom. A Chirico painting hangs on the wall, and in the distance out the window stands a Greek temple.
Giorgio de Chirico: the Making of Dreams is at the Musée d’Art moderne de la ville de Paris, 11, ave du Président Wilson, 75116 Paris until May 24. Open daily from 10am until 6 pm, 10pm on Thurs. Closed Mon and bank holidays.
See www.mam.paris.fr
Chirico replays
Real or fake? Giorgio de Chirico cast doubt on the authenticity of his own paintings by making “replays” or copies of earlier works and formally disowning hundreds of them.
The question arose yet again when the Pompidou Centre bought Chiricos The Ghost, also known as The Return of Napoleon III or Napoleon III and Cavour for €11m at the Yves Saint Laurent – Pierre Bergé sale on February 23rd.
Painted in Ferrara in 1917-18, The Ghost shows the upper part of a classical column transmogrifying into Napoleon III, alongside a headless, mannequin-like figure.
In 1972, Chirico stormed into a surrealism exhibition at the decorative arts museum in Paris and announced that four paintings bearing his signature, including Napoleon III, were fakes and that he wanted them destroyed. Lawyers and experts argued until after Chirico’s death.
Munck, the curator of the Chirico retrospective, believes The Ghost is authentic. “He sent drawings to Gala Eluard. He described in letters what the painting looked like . . . Even the de Chirico Foundation reversed its decision and certified it as real; otherwise Christie’s could not have sold it.”
What motivated Chirico? “He did it at a period when he was totally exasperated by the controversy over his metaphysical works and the ‘replays’ he made,” says Munck.
“He was deeply revolted by the art market.”
