GIORGIO DE CHIRICO (1888-1978)

In his works Giorgio de Chirico invokes the magic and mystery of his childhood in Greece through the strange conjunction of classical fragments, marble statues and mundane objects drawn from the modern world. The present Piazza d'Italia con Arianna, echoes de Chirico’s early Ariadne series, such as La ricompensa dell’indovino of 1913 (Philadelphia Museum of Art) by centring the composition of the painting on the strangely animate encounter between a classical statue of Ariadne and other objects, such as the steam train in silhouette and the modern, concrete cube in the foreground. There is an overt pictorial play between the animate and the lifeless within the picture. The hauntingly beautiful, but lifeless classical stone statue depicting a living human figure is contrasted with other inanimate but luminescent and, in pictorial terms, lively, elements and objects such as the central tower, and the two men shaking hands, against a distant rocky landscape.
Piazza d'Italia con Arianna displays the enigmatic dreamlike quality that de Chirico often bestowed upon Mediterranean antiquity, speaking of the fundamental mystery and melancholy of human existence through the ages. Ariadne, the abandoned princess of Greek mythology, appeared in his work throughout his career, an ever-constant monument to loneliness and exile. The Piazza d’Italia series display a pervasive sense of a crisis of modernity conveyed in his pictorial articulation of a strange or disjunctive antiquity. In addition, like in Willhelm Jensen's story of Gradiva which so obsessed André Breton and many other Surrealists' imaginations, there is always in de Chirico’s evocation of the antique a sense of mystic continuity between past and present.
Time, too is often suspended or even subverted in the Piazza d'Italia paintings, many of which often bear deliberately incorrect dates inscribed by the artist. Indeed, in these poetic but stage-set paintings, all is artifice; time has effectively come to a stop. Only the pervasive feeling of melancholy, implied in the present lot by the contemplative statue of Ariadne reclining, imbues these paintings with any emotion or Dionysian sense of life.
Combining themes of chaos and time, of harmony and eternity and also of the essentially hermaphroditic nature of artistic creation, De Chirico's Piazza d'Italia paintings are, like the images they show, repetitive monuments to the metaphysical odyssey that man takes through life. Depicting more or less the same scene, this odyssey represents a spiritual voyage beyond time but rooted in the timeless and eternal myth of Ariadne and her thread.