Giorgio de Chirico

Giorgio de Chirico – From engineer to painter: studies in Athens and Munich

Giorgio de Chirico was born in the Greek harbour town of Volos on 10 July 1888. His parents had moved from Italy to Greece when the father found a post as a railway engineer. Whilst de Chirico on the one hand followed his father and trained as an engineer at the polytechnic in Athens, he simultaneously studied painting with Georgios Jakobides at the Athens College of Fine Arts. Following his father’s premature death, de Chirico continued his art studies in Munich at the Königlichen Akademie der Künste where he shared rooms with the Expressionist Jorgos Busianis, three years his senior, and found a kindred spirit in the German painter Fritz Gartz. In general, his stay in Munich proved to be an extremely stimulating period for de Chirico who studied the symbolic paintings of the Swiss artist Arnold Böcklin as avidly as the lost dream worlds of the German painter Max Klinger and the Austrian graphic artist Alfred Kubin.

Turning point in Florence: The birth of Pittura Metafisca

Giorgio de Chirico read intensively the writings of the great thinkers of the era, including Friedrich Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer. During a visit to Florence in 1909, the artist was struck by a key moment: following an illness, he sat in the Piazza Santa Croce and suddenly perceived the intrinsically familiar reality in an altered state of rapture. From this impression, Giorgio de Chirico developed his Pittura Metafisca – a way of painting that takes the actual and enraptures it into a dream. The artist was able to present his paintings at the Indépendants and the Salon d’Automne in Paris which led to an exchange with the great French masters Constantin Brâncuși, André Derain and Pablo Picasso. Supported by his brother Andrea de Chirico, who had by this time taken the artist’s name Alberto Savinio, as well as the Futurist Carlo Carrà, Giorgio de Chirico founded the scuola metafisca in Ferrara, completely dedicated to the new art movement. 

From celebrated pioneer to critical despiser of Modernism

Giorgio de Chirico created surreal city scenes, the ideal architecture undisturbed by any figurative life. Only occasionally do shadows or puppets appear in the Italian’s paintings; a recurring element is also the railway in memory of his father. Friedrich Nietzsche was an important impulse who postulated that there was no absolute truth, only a relative one. It wasn’t until 1919 that the artist’s style shifted away from dreamlike-unreal back to a greater realism that was oriented towards the prevailing academic style of his time. In 1924, he contributed to the journal La Révolution surréaliste, published by André Breton. The Surrealists recognised Giorgio de Chirico’s merits for their art movement and celebrated him enthusiastically; however, in 1930 he definitively turned away from his metaphysical painting, harshly criticised modern art and cultivated an emphatically baroque painting style. Because this did not lead to economic success, de Chirico simply copied earlier works and sold them a second time – a situation which adds to the difficulties experts have in mapping his pictures. Giorgio de Chirico received prizes and awards for his work including the Große Verdienstkreuz der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany) in 1976. His pictures were exhibited a total of three times at documenta in Kassel. 

Giorgio de Chirico died in Rome on 20 November 1978.