Starting from the fundamental exhibition organised in Zurich, Berlin and Munich in 1997, Boecklin, De Chirico, Ernst. Eine Reise ins Ungewisse and the essays written by Wieland Schmied and David Sylvester towards the end of the Seventies, this exhibition explores the early years of the career of De Chirico and the influence of his first works on movements such as Surrealism and the Neue Sachlichkeit.
De Chirico was born in 1888 in Greece and partly raised there, where his engineer father designed and built railway lines. He had a prolific artistic career, and lived to a grand old age, almost as long as Picasso. He died in 1978. Having studied in Munich, at the age of twenty-one and fascinated by the work of the Symbolist painter Arnold Böcklin, he began to paint a series of strange and oneiric cityscapes. Displayed in Paris after 1911 they were enthusiastically greeted by painters and poets from Picasso to Paul Éluard, and very soon De Chirico became one of the heroes of Surrealism.
This phase of his work – the so-called metaphysical painting – lasted up to around 1918. Subsequently De Chirico changed direction. He wanted to become a classicist – and almost succeeded.
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