Giorgio de Chirico

The art of De Chirico centers upon the antithesis between classical culture and modern mechanistic civilization. These two elements are locked in struggle, and the tragic quality of this situation exudes an aura of melancholy of which De Chirico is a prime exponent. The iconographic elements of his early art, modern railways and clock towers combined with ancient architecture, are to be sought in the artist's childhood memories of Greece. For the strange visual images in which De Chirico cast his mature works, he used an airless dreamlike space in his townscapes with an exaggerated perspective artificially illuminated, with long sinister shadows, and strewn about with antique statues. There is an elegiac loneliness too (the Delights of the Poet, 1913) and the disturbing juxtaposition of such banal everyday objects as biscuits and rubber gloves with those of mythical significance.

Works of De Chirico

A favorite amusement of ancient Greece was the composition of enigmas. In De Chirico's art they symbolize an endangered transitional period of European culture. From the enigma to the riddle presented by one's dream life is but a short step.