Lugano
Giorgio de Chirico was born on July 10, 1888, in Volos, Greece, to Italian parents. From a young age he devoted himself to drawing, studying at the Athens Polytechnic (1903-1906), then at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, where he became acquainted with the Symbolist art of Böcklin and Klinger, and the philosophy of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. Returning to Italy in 1909, he began to develop a pictorial language influenced by melancholy and a sense of enigma, which would find full expression in 1910 in Florence with the first works of his Metaphysical Art.
In 1911 he moved to Paris, where he elaborated the famous cycle of Piazze d’Italia. He exhibited at the Salon d’Automne (1912) and the Salon des Indépendants (1913), attracting the attention of Picasso, Apollinaire and the dealer Paul Guillaume. In 1915, called back to Italy with his brother Alberto Savinio, he settled in Ferrara, where he met Filippo de Pisis and started the Metaphysical Interiors cycle. In 1917 he came into contact with Carlo Carrà and the Dada milieu. In 1919 he moved to Rome, held his first solo exhibition at the Casa d’Arte Bragaglia, and during this period rediscovered the art of the great artists in museums and began making copies from Italian Renaissance masters, beginning a phase of classicist research. In the 1920s he wrote for various magazines, publishing essays on ancient and modern artists. In 1922 a major solo exhibition opened at the Galerie Paul Guillaume in Paris in which fifty-five works were exhibited. He participated in the 14th Venice Biennale.
He settled in the French capital in 1925. During these years he began research on the Metaphysics of Light and Mediterranean Myth, giving rise to such themes as Archeologi, Cavalli in riva al mare, Trofei, Paesaggi nella stanza, Mobili nella valle and Gladiatori. At a solo exhibition of his work at Galerie Léonce Rosenberg, the Surrealists harshly criticized the artist’s most recent works. The rift with the Surrealists is now total and destined to worsen in the following years. He exhibited in Italy and abroad in Paris, Berlin, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Brussels, London and New York. During these years he painted silent lives, portraits and female nudes of luminous naturalism. He exhibited at the 18th Venice Biennale in the room dedicated to Italian artists in Paris. De Chirico and Isabella move to Florence for a year. In 1933 he participated in the V Triennale in Milan for which he executed the monumental fresco La cultura italiana and later also in the II Quadriennale in Rome.
In 1936 he moved to America before returning to Italy in 1938 and then to Paris, disgusted by racial decrees. In Florence, during the war years, he is hosted by his antiquarian friend Luigi Bellini, together with his partner Isabella Pakszwer, a Russian Jewess born in Warsaw. He wrote numerous theoretical articles in various periodicals later collected in “Commedia dell’arte moderna” (Rome 1945), along with essays from the “Valori Plastici” period of the early 1920s. In 1944 he settled permanently in Rome. He intensified his research on the Old Masters, executing d’après from Titian, Rubens, Delacroix, Watteau, Fragonard and Courbet. He unleashed a fierce struggle against forgeries of his works, a phenomenon that dated from the mid-1920s. In 1948 he was accepted into the Royal Society of British Artists, and in 1950 he organized an “Antibiennale” in Venice in controversy with the official art system.
In his later years he developed the so-called Neometaphysics, reworking the classical themes of his art in brighter tones. In 1970 Palazzo Reale in Milan dedicated a major anthological exhibition to him. Giorgio de Chirico died in Rome on November 20, 1978, at the age of 90.
