Photo By Gail

This painting, Giorgio de Chirico’s The Song of Love (1914), brings together incongruous and unrelated objects: the head of a Classical Greek statue, an oversized rubber glove, a green ball, and a train shrouded in darkness, silhouetted against a bright blue sky. By subverting the logical presence of objects, de Chirico created what he termed “metaphysical” paintings, representations of what lies “beyond the physical” world. Cloaked in an atmosphere of anxiety and melancholy, de Chirico’s humanoid forms, vacuous architecture, shadowy passages, and eerily elongated streets evoke the profound absurdity of a universe torn apart by World War I.

Giorgio de Chirico’s The Song of Love is part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. View it in Painting and Sculpture I, Gallery 7, 5th Floor.