Tag Archives: giorgio de chirico

Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Presents: Kay Sage, The Fourteen Daggers

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14 daggers by kay sage photo by gail worley
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 1963.

Photographed in The American Folk Art Museum in Manhattan.

 

Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Presents: Painting of Unknown Title By Yves Tanguy

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yves tangy title unknown photo by gail worley

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.

Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Presents: Giorgio De Chirico, The Philosopher’s Conquest

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the philosophers conquest photo by gail worley
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.

Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Presents: Yves Tanguy, Title Unknown

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Yves Tanguy Title Unknown
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.

Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Presents: Paul Delvaux, Small Train Station at Night

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Small Train Station at Night
Photo By Gail

Trains play a prominent, reoccurring role in Paul Delvaux’s surrealist imagery, including this eerie depiction of two locomotives leaving their terminus at night. Unpopulated, the composition of Small Train Station at Night (1959) invites the viewer to imagine inhabiting the space, this evoking a sense of loneliness and vulnerability. An unnaturally large moon casts the scene in a cool, still light that produces protracted, ominous shadows. These features betray Delvaux’s debt to Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico, who likewise explored the train as both subject and symbol in his work.

Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.