“Surrealism, like many of my writings and paintings can attest, is not content with just representing what is shapeless and expressing what is unconscious, but it wants to give shape to what is shapeless and give consciousness to what is unconscious.“
Alberto Savinio, Tutta la vita (A whole life), 1945
To mark the centenary of Surrealism, organized by the Centre Pompidou and the Association Atelier André Breton, Tornabuoni Art is presenting an exhibition dedicated to Metaphysical Painting, an Italian art current that was both a precursor and a parent to André Breton’s movement, and to its ideator: Giorgio de Chirico. Ten works by the man known as the Pictor Optimus are on display, alongside canvases by six artists of his generation who, like him, immersed themselves in the pictorial universe of dreams, silence and interiority: Felice Casorati, Giorgio Morandi, René Paresce, Alberto Savinio, Gino Severini and Mario Tozzi.
The Surrealists’ discovery of De Chirico’s work remains among the most famous historiographical legends of twentieth-century art. In 1916, Breton is said to have been so struck by a work by De Chirico in Paul Guillaume’s gallery window that he got off the bus to purchase it. Yves Tanguy, too, recounts a similar episode that led to his lifelong interest in representing dreams. René Magritte, in turn, describes being moved to tears by a reproduction of a de Chirico painting in 1922—an encounter which triggered his transition from Dadaism to Surrealism. Magritte regarded the Italian artist as «the greatest painter of our time», writing that «De Chirico was the first to dream what should be painted, not how it should be painted.»
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While Metaphysical Painting remains indissociable from the French Surrealist movement, the city Paris played no less formative a role in the development of the Italian current. De Chirico and his brother Savinio—then still known as Andrea de Chirico—lived there between 1911 and 1915. They met Guillaume Apollinaire, who admired De Chirico’s «strangely metaphysical» paintings. Pablo Picasso, too, praised the works of the two Italian painters, and the influence of Cubism with its impossible perspectives, can be seen in a number of metaphysical paintings, notably by De Chirico, Severini, Tozzi and Paresce. The latter three, alongside the De Chirico brothers, were part of a group of artists known as the «Italians of Paris», who exhibited together between 1928 and 1933.
At the outbreak of World War I, De Chirico and Savinio returned to Italy and began their military service in Ferrara in 1915. An archetype of the ideal Renaissance city, Ferrara’s squares and palaces inspired the famous Piazze d’Italia (Italian Squares) series by De Chirico, who laid the foundations for the Metaphysical School alongside Carlo Carrà. It was also here that the artists came into contact with Morandi, a native of nearby Bologna. The influence of metaphysical painting on Morandi’s canvases continued well beyond his surrealist period, as evidenced by the long shadows and fragile motionlessness of his later still lifes.
The exhibition aims to present the various subjects of Metaphysical Painting, each of which has its origins in De Chirico’s work. From landscapes to portraits, nudes and still lifes, metaphysical painters appropriated traditional painting genres and transposed them into the realm of dreams.
The everyday is juxtaposed with myth in the suspended temporalities of compositions strewn with philosophical references and poetic symbolism. If this Nietzschean rather than psychoanalytical approach has sometimes distanced the metaphysical movement from that of Breton, the hybrid creatures and disquieting atmosphere that inhabit the canvases of the artists on view undeniably cement their place in the history of Surrealism.
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