<em>‘Il faut méditerraniser la peinture’</em>: Giorgio de Chirico’s Metaphysical Painting, Nietzsche, and the Obscurity of Light
2010; eScholarship Publishing, University of California; Volume: 1; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5070/c311008863
ISSN2155-7926
Autores Tópico(s)Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Hegel
ResumoFrom their first unveiling in Parisian salons in the early 1910s, Giorgio de Chirico's Metaphysical paintings (1909-1919) set off a discursive pursuit of their ostensible geographic origins.Writing on de Chirico's solo exhibition of 1913, the critic Maurice Raynal compared his painting to the (notably Italian) archaeological nostalgia of Gabriele D'Annunzio, yet deemed de Chirico "a consciously 'French' artist."While Giovanni Papini and Ardengo Soffici argued for a particularly Italian redolence about the images, other Italian writers dismissed de Chirico's art as entirely exogenous: a product of the "cloaca maxima of Paris's Alexandrian snobberies," according to Roberto Longhi, one of Italy's most eminent art historians. 1 The American art historian James Thrall Soby described de Chirico's paintings as "unmistakably Italian," whereas the French salon critic André Billy called these same works "lugubriously Germanic," and the notable Parisian pundit Nino Frank identified in them a "very Nordic" poetry. 2 Despite the increasingly received notion of the Metaphysical paintings as betraying a fundamentally Italian sensibility, de Chirico was himself disparaged in Italy after World War One as "il greculo."More recently, one Italian critic reckoned the images as "oppressively Teutonic." 3 The collective discrepancies of such accounts recapitulate the elusive pith of the Metaphysical cityscape: a confusion and conflation of geographical allusions.Each image reveals a fractured pictorial topography, shot through with numerous, simultaneous evocations, but stripped of any precise locale.Consider, for example, de Chirico's Gare Montparnasse (1914) -perhaps his most "French" painting, in both title and style.As his only canvas to name an actual place, it invokes a specifically Parisian one.[Fig.1] Yet the preparatory drawing for the canvas is catalogued at the Musée Picasso under the title "Place d'Italie avec bananes."[Fig.2] If the painting's architectonics conjure up the iron and concrete modernity of the original Gare Montparnasse's side porch, they also evince the spare trabeation of an Athenian stoa; if the canvas's deep perspective cites the Italian Quattrocento, its radical flatness owes an equal, and undeniable, debt to Cézanne.On the occasion of a 1927 exhibition, the prominent Parisian critic, Waldemar George, suggested a new rubric under which to file de Chirico's images -a way, perhaps, to reconcile My thanks to Claudio Fogu and Lucia Re as well as to the two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments and criticisms.
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