Search

De Chirico's mysterious paintings had a profound influence on modern art but one key to understanding them is an early series of eight paintings on the mythical Greek princess Ariadne. This volume provides an overall account of De Chirico's career.

Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) is widely regarded as one of the masters of 20th century art. The originator of Metaphysical Painting, and precursor of the Surrealists, de Chirico was born in Volos, Greece, studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, and was initially influenced by Bocklin and Klinger. However he soon developed his own distinctive style, producing the first of his 'enigmatic' paintings in Italy around 1910. De Chirico's early works evoked an uneasy atmosphere through their use of strange perspectives, illogical shadows and open spaces, and he developed a theory of 'metaphysical insight' which located familiar objects in essentially mysterious relationships. In de Chirico's oeuvre a naturalistic vision always alternates, like waking and sleeping or dreaming, with another vision presenting abnormal forms and situations. If de Chirico's first period of Metaphysical paintingbetween 1910 and 1918 - remains his most celebrated, and has provided us with some of his most memorable images, it is also true that his later Metaphysical period was also a time of intense creativity and evocative art-making. But this period is his least well known. De Chirico moved on from his baroque and romantic paintings of the Forties and Fifties - works which diminished his standing among a number of art critics - to a 'new' Metaphysical period which related strongly to the rich, early phase of his work. This book is a celebration of that period in de Chirico's career, and evaluates not only his paintings, but also the mythic and symbolic sculptures produced at this time. De Chirico: The New Metaphysics is an essential resource for any reader interested in appreciating de Chirico's uniquecontribution to 20th century art.

Gathered from early twentieth-century Italian magazines, manuscripts, correspondence, television recordings, and ephemeral art volumes, Geometry of Shadows is the first comprehensive collection of Giorgio de Chirico's Italian poetry, with award-winning poet Stefania Heim's translations presented alongside the Italian originals. De Chirico's poems are as essential and as mysterious as his paintings. --Jhumpa Lahiri A multifaceted artist who lived in multiple languages, de Chirico was just becoming famous in France for the paintings that inspired surrealism when he returned to Italy in 1916 to enlist for the First World War. Quickly determined unfit for the front line, de Chirico was assigned to desk duty and began to write poems in his native language. Translating his iconic visual imagination into literary form, Geometry of Shadows is a gorgeous document celebrating the elasticity and innate potential of language, by an artist ever in pursuit of deeper understanding.

The impact of the melancholy, metaphysical art of Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) had much to do with his unique ability to see antiquity anew, and to locate its props in mysterious, atemporal dreamscapes. De Chirico loaded his depictions of Greek and Roman statues and architecture with muted intimations of allegory, locking away their meanings in foreboding enigmas that were among the earliest articulations of the Surrealist project. Published for a 2013 exhibition at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, Giorgio de Chirico: Myth and Archaelogy gathers a selection of lesser-known early works by de Chirico--bronze sculptures and drawings that address the artist's innovative use of myth (such as Dioscuri, the Argonauts and Ariadne), archaeological artifacts and historical events from the classical era.