Photo By Gail Worley
Giorgio de Chirico’s description of New York as a “feverish and dreamy city” finds form in this painting from 1972, Metaphysical Interior in Manhattan. Everyday objects pile into a vaguely human shape within a distorted room that opens onto city skies. The artist founded Metaphysical Painting, a movement that trafficked in the unexpected and irrational.
Photographed in the New York Historical Socially in Manhattan.
Photo By Gail
Katherine “Kay” Sage (1898 – 1963) came from a wealthy American family. In 1937, she moved to Paris intending to establish herself as an artist. Inspired by Surrealism, she became friendly with Yves Tanguy, whom she married in 1940. Sage was very attracted by the work of Giorgio De Chirico and this influenced her early works. As with her husband, she was drawn to depicting remote landscapes with a far horizon devoid of human figures. Her paintings only rarely show human figures and these are usually wrapped or enveloped in cloth. Thus, we see the The Fourteen Daggers (1942) with two wrapped figures set in a De Chirico metaphysical space. Sage did fewer new paintings after Tanguy’s death in 1955, partly because of her depression and partly because of her decreasing eyesight due to cataracts. Sadly, she took her own life in 1963.
Photographed in The American Folk Art Museum in Manhattan.
Yves Tanguy’s debt to the still and imaginative landscapes of the Italian Surrealist Giorgio de Chirico is apparent in this work’s perplexing array of imagery that includes a small school of fish and child flattened by a cart. The plain white tower in the background — a favorite iconographic motif of de Chirico — secures the connection between the two artists. The title of this fun painting from 1926 is unknown
Photographed in The Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.
Photo By Gail
Giorgio de Chirico’s work represents an unexpected form of classicism in early avant-garde painting. The Philosopher’s Conquest (1913 – 14), one of six in a series, combines a Mediterranean cityscape with familiar still-life objects that appear in many of the artists’s paintings, including a classical arcade, a cannon and cannonballs, a clock, chimney and a train. The stage set is an Italian piazza, virtually deserted except for the menacing, shadowy figures outside the edge of the scene. Rendered with a matter-of-fact — though intentionally crude — precision, de Chirico’s paintings seem rife with meaning but are resolutely enigmatic. Indeed, by juxtaposing incongruous objects, he sought to produce a metaphysical art, one that “resembles . . . the restlessness of myth.”
Photographed in The Art Institute, Chicago.
Photo By Gail
This unknown-titled work from 1926 shows French Surrealist painter Yves Tanguy’s debt to the still and imaginative landscapes of the Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico. The influence is apparent in the perplexing array of imagery that includes a small school of fish and a child flattened by a cart. The plain white tower in the background — a favorite iconographic motif of de Chirico — secures the connection between the two artists.
Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.