De Chirico exhibition: machine people in empty marketplaces

Empty places, over which backdrop-like buildings cast long shadows, eyeless jointed dolls, angular dimensions and geometric bodies - Giorgio de Chirico's pictures are icons of early modernism, spread on countless art prints and calendar sheets.

They owe their popularity to the decorative, effective visualization of an atmosphere of homelessness and alienation, which is felt to be present even more than a century after these works were created.

Such a work is in danger of gradually solidifying into a cliché behind its mass reproduction. An exhibition at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, conceived together with the Paris Musées d'Orsay et de l'Orangerie, now gives the opportunity, after a long break from the corona, to rediscover de Chirico's work before the originals and to understand the enormous influence he had on Surrealism and exercised the new objectivity. The focus of the show is on the works that make de Chirico's fame: the “metaphysical painting” that was created between 1909 and 1919.

It is represented with thirty-five high-class works and forms the thematic and spatial center of the show, which is cleverly staged by the curator Annabelle Görgen-Lammers: The paintings hang on anthracite-colored partitions that are slightly tilted. They allude to the irritating perspectives of de Chirico's urban landscapes with their different vanishing points, which give the compositions, which at first glance seem so bright and clear, a slightly nightmarish quality. De Chirico called his painting “metaphysical” because it was supposed to direct our gaze beneath the surface of things, to bring to light their secret logic and their enigmatic character. The jointed dolls - his second iconic subject - are also the result of this alienation.

Originated in the First World War, they have their real role model not only in the dolls in the tailor's workshops, but also in the prostheses of the war invalids. De Chirico met them in a military hospital in Ferrara, where he himself was temporarily housed. At the same time, these pictures reflect a deeply romantic fascination for the type of “machine man”, whose roots go back at least to ETA Hoffmann. However, the articulated dolls also show how de Chirico varies recurring motifs and stylistic features, which gives his painting style something serial. The trademark character of the pictures emerged early on.

The painting of this phase was also metaphysical in a more direct way: During his studies in Munich from 1906 to 1909, de Chirico was inspired by reading Schopenhauer and above all Nietzsche.

His interpretation of Greek myths and his relativization of the concept of truth fascinated him as much as Nietzsche's idea of ​​the return of the same thing, which he gave painterly expression with his empty spaces in which time seems to stand still.

From an artistic point of view, the works of Max Klinger and Arnold Böcklin played a decisive role in de Chirico's development.

How great their influence was is made clear by graphics and paintings by both artists, which can be seen in rooms on both sides of the central exhibition area.

De Chirico's change of perspective

This contextualization is one of the great merits of the exhibition. It shows that the decade of the “Pittura metafisica”, which was mostly taken for the whole of de Chirico, represented only one episode in his artistic career that was framed by the late romanticism: the works of Klinger and Böcklin, with which de Chirico also discussed it in Munich, formed the starting point from which he developed the factual, surreal geometry of his “metaphysical” imagery, which was stylistically very different. And de Chirico turned back to the late Romanticism in the early twenties. The farewell to "metaphysical painting", which to this day is considered to be the only significant contribution to art history, is marked by the painting "The Sacred Fish" from 1919:It is true that the geometric bodies, cast shadows and mutually shifted perspectives from de Chirico's modern-metaphysical phase can still be found here. But he has already painted the gold shimmering fish in the center of the picture in an academic style. They signal his artistic future, which stylistically is a return.

A self-portrait from 1920, in which de Chirico portrays himself as the aging Odysseus in the style of Böcklin, stands for the temporal limit of the exhibition. Neither de Chirico's colleagues nor the art historians appreciated this “step backwards”. From the twenties on, de Chirico therefore lived in the shadow of his own fame. The Pittura metafisica had become so much his trademark that in the 1920s to 1950s he produced imitations and variations of these images and backdated these replicas in order to be able to sell them as works of his artistic heyday.

In addition to these stylistic self-plagiarisms, many actual forgeries made their way onto the art market, so that to this day it takes expertise to separate the wheat from the chaff. The Hamburger Kunsthalle also fell for a fake in 1957. That with “G. de Chirico "signed work" Melancholy einer Straße "was painted in the early forties by the surrealist painter Oscar Domínguez after an original de Chiricos from 1914. After all, for a noble cause: the proceeds went to the Resistance in France. In the exhibition catalog, which is well worth reading, there is a photo from 1970 that shows a handsome elderly gentleman next to this very picture in the art gallery. It's Giorgio de Chirico.

Giorgio de Chirico. Magical Reality.