Giorgio de Chirico

Paul Guillaume, Paris
Private Collection
(possibly) Sale: Hotel Drouot, Paris, April 30, 1921, lot 12 (titled La Révelation du Solitaire and measuring 77 by 53 cm)
Paul Eluard, Paris (by 1937)
Gala Dali (acquired from the above and until 1982)
Galerie Jan Krugier, Geneva (by 1987)
Acquired from the above by the present owner

(possibly) Paris, Paul Guillaume Gallery, Exposition G. de Chirico, 1922, no. 45 (titled La Révelation du Solitaire)
Paris, Musée Jeu de Paume, Origines et Développement de L'Art International Indépendant, 1937, no. 96 (titled Intérieur métaphysique and as dating from 1917; featured in a installation photograph of the exhibition)

James Thrall Soby, Giorgio de Chirico, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1966, illustrated p. 220 (titled Metaphysical Still Life)
Massimo Carra, Metafisica, Milan, 1968, no. 126, illustrated p. 211
Maurizio Fagiolo dell'Arco, Il Tempo di Apollinaire, Rome, 1981, p. 149 (featured in a photograph of the 1937 exhibition)
Maurizio Fagiolo dell'Arco, L'opera completa di Giorgio de Chirico, Milan, 1984, no. 101, illustrated p. 99 (titled Interno Metafisico)
Maurizio Fagiolo dell'Arco, La Vita di Giorgio de Chirico, Turin, 1988, no. 52, illustrated (as dating from 1917)
Maurizio Fagiolo dell'Arco, De Chirico, gli anni Trenta, Milan, 1995, no. 8, illustrated p. 321 (titled La Révelation du solitaire)
Paolo Baldacci, De Chirico, The Metaphysical Period 1888-1919, Milan, 1997, no. 114, illustrated in color p. 330 (titled Composizione metafisica)

The canvas is lined. There are scattered spots of retouching visible under UV light, mostly covering paint shrinkage and associated small losses. This work is in good condition.
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Natura morta metafisica is a stunning, enigmatic and colorful composition painted at the height of de Chirico's Metaphysical period, only a year before he would formally found the Scuola Metafisica together with Carlo Carrà.  The term "metaphysical" had first been given to de Chirico's paintings in 1914 by the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire and referred to the enigmatic quality of his urban landscapes.  The philosophical objectives of these paintings drew upon an amalgam of the teachings of the German philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer and Otto Weininger.  De Chirico also took his inspiration from the spatial distortions of the Cubists in the early 1910s and emphasized the deep recesses and angularity of the Renaissance and Neo-Classical buildings.  These influences are visible in the present work in the overlapping geometric forms and intersecting lines of perspective. While de Chirico alludes to the Renaissance masters, he subverts their scientific approach to create a destabilizing, unsettling sense of space.  De Chirico's best metaphysical compositions, like this one, are oddly devoid of any life, exposing the evocative power of inanimate objects.  

 

The present work was executed during de Chirico's stay in Ferrara during the First World War, where he settled after his return from Paris.  His paintings from the Ferrara period display a specific iconography including imaginary maps (fig. 1), biscuits (fig. 2) and semi-abstract, quasi-architectural elements, such as those visible in the present composition.  The partly visible armour recalls the mannequin figures, the most iconic image of his metaphysical painting.  The ever-present classical and neo-classical architecture of the Italian cities is visible in the background, evocative of the artist's haunting, melancholy depictions of town squares.  As de Chirico himself commented: "[My art is a] frightening astuteness, it returns from beyond unexplored horizons to fix itself in metaphysical eternity, in the terrible solitude of an inexplicable lyricism: a biscuit, the corner formed by two walls, a drawing that evokes the nature of the idiotic and insensate world which accompanies us through this tenebrous life" (quoted in P. Baldacci, op. cit., p. 326).  

 

Writing about objects that populate de Chirico's interiors and still-lifes painted in Ferrara, James Thrall Soby commented:  "Many of these objects were probably inspired, though imaginatively transformed, by things the artist had actually seen on walks through the city of Ferrara with his new friend, de Pisis.  De Chirico himself is explicit on this point. In his autobiography he writes:  'The appearance of Ferrara, one of the loveliest cities in Italy, had made a deep impression on me, but what struck me above all and inspired me from the metaphysical point of view in which I was then working, was the appearance of certain interiors in Ferrara, certain window displays, certain shops, certain houses, certain quarters, as for instance the old ghetto where one could find candy and cookies in exceedingly strange and metaphysical shapes.'  In Ferrara's shops de Chirico perhaps saw the drawing instruments and armatures which became a principal iconographical motif in his 1916 still lifes" (J. Thrall Soby, op. cit., p. 110).

 

Although the hyper-realism of the pictorial elements recalls the trompe-l'oeil technique of the 17th and 18th century Dutch painters, their presentation in this composition is radically modern.  De Chirico combines genres of city-scape, interior and still-life within a single composition, juxtaposing disparate objects within a non-specific architectural enclosure and illuminates them with a theatrical spot light.  The staged, otherworldly appearance of his metaphysical paintings had a profound influence on the avant-garde, and established de Chirico as one of the most inventive painters in the years immediately following the First World War. His mystical compositions had a particularly strong influence on the Surrealist artists, as reflected in the provenance of the present work: Natura morta metafisica was acquired by the Surrealist poet Paul Eluard by 1937, and later passed into the hands of his wife Gala, who was to marry Salvador Dalí.