Giorgio de Chirico: The Complete Story
Giorgio de Chirico invented the empty dream city that Surrealism was built on, then spent fifty years disowning it, repainting it, and backdating his own canvases. The movement he inspired excommunicated him, and he outlived nearly all of them.
Trains, arcades, shadows, a rubber glove: the metaphysical paintings lasted barely a decade, and the argument about everything after has never stopped.
Giorgio de Chirico at a glance:
1888: born in Volos, Greece, son of an Italian railway engineer; stations and trains never leave the work.
1910: in Florence, the first metaphysical square arrives after an illness, in front of Santa Croce.
1915: drafted to Ferrara, where arcades and shop windows restart the engine through the war.
1919: the U-turn: he declares himself a classicist in the Valori Plastici circle and never fully returns.
1978: dies in Rome at 90, his apartment above the Spanish Steps already half a museum.
A Greek childhood full of trains
De Chirico was born to Italian parents in Volos, Greece, on July 10, 1888. His father was a railway engineer, which is one reason distant trains puff through so many of his paintings.
After studies in Athens and at the Munich academy, where he absorbed Arnold Bocklin's islands and Nietzsche's philosophy, he had a revelation in Piazza Santa Croce in Florence in 1910 and painted his first enigma picture.
Paris, 1911-1915: the metaphysical city
In Paris, Apollinaire championed him and coined the word metaphysical for the plazas he painted: arcades at sunset, impossible shadows, clocks, artichokes, and in The Song of Love of 1914, a surgical glove nailed beside a Greek head. Recalled to Italy in 1915, he spent the war in Ferrara, where he and Carlo Carra codified pittura metafisica, and where the mannequins without faces arrived.
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1919: the U-turn
Around 1919, after standing in front of a Titian in Rome, de Chirico announced a return to craft, to museums, to classical painting. The young Surrealists, who had made his early work their foundation stone, were appalled.
Breton excommunicated him publicly, and by 1928 the movement treated the living de Chirico as an impostor squatting in the body of their dead prophet.
The self-forger
His revenge was slow and strange.
For decades he repainted his own metaphysical compositions, sometimes dating them twenty or thirty years earlier, while denouncing authentic early canvases as fakes when they displeased him at auction.
Experts still untangle the chronology. He called the late repaints better than the originals and meant it.
The long last act, and where to see him
In his final decade de Chirico circled back, painting sunnier neo-metaphysical plazas from 1968 onward that museums have since rehabilitated. He died in Rome on November 20, 1978, at 90.
The Song of Love hangs at MoMA, Ferrara-period works at the Peggy Guggenheim in Venice, and his apartment above the Spanish Steps in Rome is now the Casa Museo de Chirico.
Ferrara, and the metaphysical interiors
Drafted in 1915, he pushed papers in Ferrara while the city's arcades fed the pictures: the metaphysical interiors date from those years.
In a military hospital he converted Carlo Carrà, who promptly presented the style as his own invention. The friendship did not survive the footnotes.
The Ferrara canvases fill with biscuits, maps and set-squares: groceries promoted to oracles.
Hebdomeros
In 1929 he published a novel, Hebdomeros, a plotless dream narrative that even his Surrealist enemies admired; several called it the movement's best prose, written by its excommunicated saint.
The memoirs are another performance entirely: score-settling, self-praise and sudden beauty, with modern art cast as a conspiracy against craft.
Writer and painter shared one method: total certainty, on both sides of every U-turn.
The theater decades
From Diaghilev's Le Bal in 1929 onward he built stages: ballets, operas, and in time his own daily costume drama.
The late self-portraits dress him as matador, nobleman, seventeenth-century cavalier. The man who painted empty squares now filled every mirror.
The stage work has aged best of the late period: the exaggeration that annoyed critics on canvas was simply correct at thirty meters.
The Giorgio de Chirico questions that keep coming up
What is metaphysical painting? The style de Chirico built between 1910 and 1918: ordinary Italian squares emptied of people and filled with long shadows, statues, trains, and objects that feel like omens.
Why did the Surrealists reject de Chirico? They worshipped his pre-1919 work, so his turn to classical craft read as betrayal. Breton attacked him in print, and the split never healed.
Did de Chirico fake his own paintings? He made later versions of early compositions and backdated some, while calling genuine early works fakes. It remains one of the thorniest attribution problems of the twentieth century.
Where can I see de Chirico? MoMA in New York for The Song of Love, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, and the Casa Museo de Chirico in Rome, his home for his last 30 years.
How much does a de Chirico cost? Pre-1919 metaphysical pictures reach into the tens of millions; the late repaints trade for a small fraction of that, a market verdict he resented loudly.
Who runs his estate? The Fondazione Giorgio e Isa de Chirico, in his old apartment by the Spanish Steps, now a museum that authenticates and shows the whole sweep, U-turns included.
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Stamped with the word verità
The painter accused of forging himself kept receipts: he stamped some late repaints with the word verita, truth, on the back, daring the market to decide which de Chirico was real.
