Giorgio de Chirico was an Italian painter, born in Volos, Greece, on 10 July 1888, who died in Rome on 20 November 1978. Between 1910 and 1918 he painted the empty squares, long shadows and faceless mannequins of Metaphysical painting, and the Surrealists built on them. He is remembered for that, and for what came next: he turned against those pictures, copied them and backdated the copies.
The movement that took his early work as its model threw him out in 1926. He went on painting for another half century.
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The story turns on one picture, The Disquieting Muses, which de Chirico painted in 1918. In 1924 the poet Paul Éluard and his wife Gala wanted it. Its owner, Giorgio Castelfranco, refused to sell at the price they offered.
De Chirico had a solution. He offered to paint a copy for a small fee.
He did not stop with one. He made more copies of the Muses, of Hector and Andromache, of the Piazza d'Italia and of several Metaphysical Interiors, and he dated many of them to the 1910s, years before he painted them. Today, telling his originals from his copies takes experts, and sometimes X-rays and paint analysis.
What You'll Discover
Where the empty squares came from.
What a rubber glove is doing there.
Why his admirers turned on him.
What he called his own copies.
The novel his enemies admired.