DE CHIRICO, GIORGIO

born July 10, 1888, Vlos, Greece died Nov. 19, 1978, Rome, Italy Italian painter who, with Carlo Carr and Giorgio Morandi, founded the pittura metafisica style of painting (see Metaphysical painting). In 1906 de Chirico entered the Munich Academy of Fine Arts. His early style was influenced by the paintings of Arnold Bcklin and Max Klinger, which juxtapose the fantastic with the commonplace. By 1910 he was living in Florence, where he began painting a unique series of landscapes such as The Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon (1910), in which the long, sinister, and illogical shadows cast by unseen objects onto empty city spaces contrast starkly with the bright, clear light, which is rendered in brooding green tonalities. Moving to Paris in 1911, de Chirico gained the admiration of Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire with his ambiguously ominous scenes of deserted piazzas with classical statues, dark arcades, and small, isolated figures overpowered by their own shadows and by severe, oppressive architecture. Such works are exemplified by The Soothsayer's Recompense (1913) and The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street (1914). At Ferrara, in 1915, de Chirico practiced a modification of his earlier manner, marked by more compact groupings of incongruous objects. In paintings of this period, such as the Grand Metaphysical Interior (1917) and The Seer (1915), the colours are brighter, and dressmakers' mannequins, draftsmen's compasses, biscuits, and paintings on easels assume a mysterious significance within enigmatic perspectival landscapes or interiors. The element of mystery in de Chirico's paintings dwindled after 1919, when he became interested in the technical methods of the Italian classical tradition. He eventually began painting in a more realistic and academic style, and by the 1930s he had broken with his avant-garde colleagues and had disclaimed his earlier works. De Chirico's Metaphysical paintings exercised a profound influence on the painters of the Surrealist movement in the 1920s.