Giorgio de Chirico
Giorgio de Chirico (1888 - Volos, Greece / 1978 - Rome, Italy), a pioneer in the revival of Classicism that flourished into a Europe-wide phenomenon in the 1920s. His own inerest was likely encouraged by his childhood experiences of being raised in Greece by Italian parents. And, while living in Paris in the 1910s, his homesickness may have led to the mysterious, classically-inspired pictures of empty town squares for which he is best known. It was work in this style that encouraged him to form the short-lived Metaphysical Painting movement, along with the painter Carlo Carrà. His work in this mode attracted considerable notice, particulary in France where the Surrealists championed him as a precusor. But de Chirico was instinctively more conservative than the Paris avant-garde, and in the 1920s his style began to embarace qualities of Renaissance and Baroque art, a move that soon drew criticism from his old supporters. For many years aftewards, the Surrealists disapproval of his late work shaped the attitude of critics. The artist`s reputation was also not helped by his later habits of creating new versions of his Metaphysical paintings and of backdating his work, as if those pictures had been created back in the 1910s. In recent years, however, his work of that period has attracted more interest, and it was certainly influential on a new generation of Italian painters in the 1980s...