Chirico

Author: Chen Yingde, Zhang Mimi
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-11-01
Features: The Italian metaphysical painting master Giorgio de Chirico believed: "Metaphysical art appears tranquil on the surface, but it gives the impression that something is about to happen in this tranquility." He combined human mannequins, utensils, and geometric shapes to depict a mysterious world of solitude, resembling an inner landscape in meditation. The Disturbing Muse is one of his representative works. At the age of 30, he had completed most of his metaphysical works and began to develop a retro spirit, devoted to the re-presentation of classical painting. Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978) was born in Greece to Italian parents. His father was a railway engineer who had worked in Greece and Germany. Chirico received his early art education primarily in Munich and deeply admired the works of German late-19th-century painters such as Feininger and Klinger. At the same time, Freud's psychoanalytic theory and his research on the expression of intuition, hallucinations, and subconscious imagery in painting had a profound influence on German painters. Although Chirico tolerated the Expressionist painting that emerged in Munich, he did not follow this style. The decisive factor that led him to metaphysical painting was the philosophy of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Their exploration of the rational world of humans provided Chirico with strong inspiration. Nietzsche's description in his works of the arcades on the Piazza San Carlo in Turin and the long shadows they cast left an extremely deep impression on the young Chirico. In 1915, he turned this impression into The Silence of Turin and The Melancholy and Mystery of a Street (Figure 62). In many of his later works, he could not escape from squares, arches, and long shadows, such as The Reward of the Diviner, The Anxious Journey, and The Disturbing Goddesses of Art, among others.