Giorgio de Chirico

Alfred Flechtheim and Giorgio de Chirico

Giorgio de Chirico is considered the most important representative of pittura metafisica – Metaphysical Painting, a precursor of Surrealism. De Chirico was strongly influenced by the works of Arnold Böcklin and the notions put forward by Friedrich Nietzsche that there is no absolute but only relative truth. At the beginning of the 20th century he developed his own formal language characterised by the mysteriousness of his depictions. In his pictures de Chirico confronts the world as a mystery that is to be interpreted. Faceless jointed dolls, enigmatic objects and fragments of statues people deserted and idealised architectural landscapes in numerous paintings by the artist. Those associatively crafted compositions that emanate from a classically motivated inventory of images as well as the considerable technical precision of their execution are similarly features of his style of painting. At the end of the 1920s de Chirico’s style altered and the painter adopted a dramatic, Classicist pictorial language. In the early 1930s the artist left France and settled in Italy where he spent the war period. Works including one oil painting and graphic works were confiscated from museums in Germany during the ‘Degenerate Art’ campaign.

In the anniversary issue of ‘Der Querschnitt’ in 1928 de Chirico congratulated Alfred Flechtheim by contributing a drawing. At the same time, Flechtheim showed one of the artist’s works in his gallery. That same year and in the two following years he was represented by Flechtheim in three further group exhibitions. In 1930 and 1932 the art dealer honoured de Chirico at his galleries in Berlin and Düsseldorf in two comprehensive solo exhibitions.