The house of Giorgio De Chirico |
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Collection title
Tgr Bellitalia
First broadcast date
2009
Abstract
The magazine presents the House-Museum of Giorgio De Chirico (1888-1978), a great italian painter, founder of the metaphysical art movement.
Close-ups of paintings, sculptures and details of the interiors rebuilt in the original plan : the study, intact with everything needed for painting, such as molds, materials, his chair, the library.
Views of the Piazza di Spagna and the Church of Trinita dei Monti seen from the windows.
Photography B / W shows De Chirico working. Interview with Paolo Picozza, President of the "Fondazione Giorgio e Isa De Chirico".
Broadcaster
RAI - RAI Tre
Audiovisual form
Magazine
Credits / Cast
- Hagge Marco - Author of original work
- Picozza Paolo - Participant
Original language
Italian
Additional information
B/W photos of De Chirico working.
Context
"Giorgio de Chirico's House"
Jean-Lucien Bonillo
Giorgio de Chirico (1888 – 1978) lived on Rome's Piazza di Spagna, and that could not have been a fortuitous choice. The noisy Piazza is in fact a vast area of public space wihich links the church of the Trinità dei Monti, whose parvis is graced with an obelisk, to the Fontana della Barcaccia by way of a monumental 18th century staircase (Francesco de Sanctis 1726). The fountain was commissioned by Pope Urban VIII and made by the sculptors Pietro Bernini and his son Gian Lorenzo. It is in itself a baroque work almost surrealist in spirit: a half-sunken boat in the centre of an eliptical basin with water overflowing across its bows. The ship, with the Pope's family arms, is carrying a fountain from which spouts the water which seems to have sunk the boat.
For a painter who since 1910 had built his reputation on his metaphysical (a term used later by the poet Apollinaire) reading of Italian squares, seeing and using this space every day would seem essential.
After joining a group of Paris-based surrealists (who would later reject him as his work evolved), de Chirico went to Ferrara during the First World War and in a military hospital met the painter Carlo Carrà (a defector from Futurism). Together they created the "scuola metafisica" (metaphysical school)
The group soon expanded and two trends can be identified in the metaphysical painting: that of de Chirico and his brother Alberto Savinio, full of literary and symbolic meaning; and that of Carlo Carrà and Giorgio Morandi, influenced more by a formal and pictural sensitivity which came from "magic realism".
All four became involved to a greater or lesser extent in a vast movement which was created in Milan in 1922, the Novecento. An anti-futurist and anti-avant-garde trend which advocated a reinterpretation of the ancient and classical tradition.
From his very first works, de Chirico was clearly quoting the Italian painters of the Trecento and the Quattrocento (13th and 14th centuries), particularly in the way they saw architecture. It was combined with the influence of German Romanticism and Symbolism (he had lived in Munich in 1905), especially Arnold Bocklin. It is to him we owe the dream-like, fantastical and metaphorical qualities of de Chirico, the unsettling mystery that emerges from the urban perspectives rhythmed with arcades, peopled with scuptures and classical parodies illuminated by a low sun which enlarges the shadows beyond reality. Mannequins and unusual objects then occupy the space in his work which, towards the end of his long career, will be limited, from copying the old masters, to the idea of a "well-made painting". A production which was less appreciated by the critics.....and the market. In the film, the painter denies this analysis and emphasises the unity and coherence of the totality of his work. All the same, the film reveals a certain conformity in the way the painter's flat is arranged. Unlike, for example, Salvador Dali's house in Cadaques which is full of surreal furniture and objects of a piece with that painter's imagination, the middle-class and strictly normal spirit of de Chirico's flat is striking. Some critics accused him of being a narcissistic painter, and the overhwelming presence of his own works on all the walls would seem to confirm that judgement.
Brief bibliography but to the point
- Cocteau Jean, Le mystère laïc. Essai d’étude indirecte (Giorgio de Chirico), Paris, ed. Des quatre chemins, 1928.
- Fagiolo Dell’arco Maurizio, La vita di Giorgio di Chirico, Turin, ed.Umberto Allemandi & Cie, 1988.
- Lista Giovanni, Giorgio de Chirico – Suivi de l’Art Métaphysique, Paris, ed. Hazan, 2009.
- Catalogue d’exposition, (Fabrice Hergott) Giorgio de Chirico. La fabrique des rêves, Paris, Musée d’Art Moderne de la ville de Paris, 2009.
