In Milan the great exhibition devoted to George de Chirico

Opening on 25 September is the great exhibition devoted to George de Chirico (Volos, 1888 - Rome, 1978), which through some 100 masterpieces reconstructs the unrepeatable career of the Pictor Optimus.  The rooms in Palazzo Reale in Milan, almost 50 years since the solo exhibition of 1970, again host de Chirico's work in an extraordinary retrospective curated by Luca Massimo Barbero, promoted and produced by the City of Milan-Culture, Palazzo Reale, Marsilio and Electa, in collaboration with the Giorgio and Isa de Chirico Foundation. 

 

 

 

Giorgio de Chirico (Volos, 1888 - Rome, 1978) grew up in Greece, spent his formative years in the Munich of the Secession and matured in avant-garde Paris. Here he developed the theme of melancholy and the first paintings of the piazzas of Italy: visually electrifying, his works anticipated the avant-gardes and Surrealism. Returning to Italy on the outbreak of the war, in 1915 he settled with his brother, Alberto Savinio, in Ferrara, where Filippo de Pisis and Carlo Carrà were also living, leading to the development of the complex phase of Ferrarese interiors and the Disquieting Muses: paintings with an originally figurative character but in which each subject becomes a vision with dreamlike and mysterious overtones.

 

With a capacity that drew on Baroque impetuosity and a totally fantastic imagery made up of riders, landscapes and exuberant still lifes (he used the term “vite silenti” in preference to the usual Italian “nature morte”), de Chirico's painting entered into full contrast with contemporary art in the post-war period, confirming him again once, against all paradoxes, one of the masters of the mid-twentieth century. Convinced that the road taken was the only plausible one, in 1948 he engaged in polemics directed against the Venice Biennale, which he accused of championing a modernist current. He organized a series of “anti-Biennali” in the spaces of the Bucintoro, not far from Piazza San Marco. De Chirico, idolized and criticized, without slowing the flow of his painting, invented enchanted landscapes, irreverent self-portraits, with some in costume that anticipated today's themes of performance, to the point of claiming the right to reinvent the world of his Metaphysical paintings from early in the century. New fantastic inventions such as the sun on the easel, shadowy riders and weary troubadours were fatefully combined in the last years of his always vitalistic career with the Metaphysical rooms, the disquieting mannequins and the unique vision of this traveler in time and images. Giorgio de Chirico died in Rome in November 1978.