Palazzo Strozzi, February 26 – July 18, 2010

 

Organisation             Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi

 

 

 

Starting from the fundamental exhibition organised in Zurich, Berlin and Munich in 1997, Boecklin, De Chirico, Ernst. Eine Reise ins Ungewisse and the essays written by Wieland Schmied and David Sylvester towards the end of the Seventies, this exhibition explores the early years of the career of De Chirico and the influence of his first works on movements such as Surrealism and the Neue Sachlichkeit.

 

De Chirico was born in 1888 in Greece and partly raised there, where his engineer father designed and built railway lines. He had a prolific artistic career, and lived to a grand old age, almost as long as Picasso. He died in 1978. Having studied in Munich, at the age of twenty-one and fascinated by the work of the Symbolist painter Arnold Böcklin, he began to paint a series of strange and oneiric cityscapes. Displayed in Paris after 1911 they were enthusiastically greeted by painters and poets from Picasso to Paul Éluard, and very soon De Chirico became one of the heroes of Surrealism. This phase of his work – the so-called metaphysical painting – lasted up to around 1918. Subsequently De Chirico changed direction. He wanted to become a classicist – and almost succeeded.

 

For almost a hundred years, De Chirico’s city (a fantasy city, a mental state that signified alienation, dream and loss) has been one of the capitals of the Modernist imagination. Its elements are so famous that they fall into place as soon as they are mentioned. The arcades, the tower, the piazza, the shadows, the statue, the train, the mannequin. It may be that he perceived their poetic potential admiring the paintings of Böcklin portraying Italian arcades, but no artist inserted architectural elements in his works more than he. That De Chirico was a poet – and a great poet – is not in dispute. He managed to condense intensity of feeling through metaphor and association. In The Joy of Return (1915) De Chirico’s train has once more entered the city; its black silhouette is set in the centre of the looming, grey facades; a bright ball of steam hovers above its smokestack. Et quid amabo nisi quod aenigma est? (What shall I love if not the enigma?) – this question, inscribed by the young artist on his self-portrait in 1911, is the true subtext of all his paintings.