Giorgio de Chirico & The Uncertainty of the Poet

Giorgio de Chirico

Giorgio de Chirico 1888-1978

Was a Italian painter, sculptor, theatrical designer and writer born at Volo in Greece, of Italian parents. He studied drawing and painting at the Athens Polytechnic 1903-6 and for eighteen months at the Munich Academy, where he discovered the work of Bocklin. He then returned  to Italy in 1908. In Paris 1911-15, he met Apollinaire, Picasso and other and painted a highly influential group of paintings evoking dream-like visions of Italy.

Giorgio de Chirico

The Uncertainty of the Poet

De Chirico’s quiet square evokes the classical arcades and statuary of antiquity (the sculpture is a torso of Aphrodite). In contrast, the passing train and perishable bananas suggest a sense of the contemporary and immediate. The distorted perspective and shadows undermine the conventions of pictorial space and time. De Chirico’s early works were enthusiastically embraced by the Surrealists, who saw in them a dream-like parallel existence. The poet Paul Eluard wrote: ‘these squares are outwardly similar to existing squares and yet we have never seen them... We are in an immense, previously inconceivable, world.’ 

The Uncertainty of the poet