Giorgio de Chirico, "The Anxious Journey"
About this video
Curator Anna Umland introduces Giorgio de Chirico's The Anxious Journey (1913), painted in his breakthrough year and praised by the poet-critic Guillaume Apollinaire as modern and 'metaphysical'. She shows how de Chirico uses Renaissance perspective tools in a way that doesn't add up, with shadowy arcades and a looming locomotive, and explains why Surrealists such as Breton and Magritte saw him as a key precursor.
You'll be able to
- explain why Apollinaire called de Chirico's paintings modern and metaphysical.
- describe how de Chirico uses perspective to create a space that doesn't add up.
- explain why the Surrealists saw de Chirico as a precursor.
Key words
- metaphysical
- Concerned with ideas beyond the physical world; here, a strange, dreamlike quality.
- arcade
- A row of arches, often along a walkway.
- orthogonals
- Lines in a perspective drawing that run back into space towards a vanishing point.
- precursor
- Something that comes before and leads the way for a later development.
- avant-garde
- New, experimental art that pushes ahead of accepted styles.
Transcript
(music) - [Anna Umland] I'm here in storage with Giorgio deChirico's 1913 painting, The Anxious Journey. 1913 was a breakthrough year for Giorgio deChirico. This work is probably one that was included in a exhibition that deChirico staged for himself in his studio in Paris, and among the people who came to see that show was the great poet and critic and champion of Avent Garde art, Guillaume Apollinaire.
In October of 1913, Apollinaire wrote about his experience of deChirico's paintings, and he remarked on these painting's absolutely modern quality and then on their strangely metaphysical character. deChirico makes you think about how painting can be not about a reality perceived, but about a reality imagined.
What you're looking at is a series of architectural arcades arranged in a space that has ways, that since the Renaissance artists had used to construct a plausible represenation of a believable negotiatable space. You have the orthogonals. You have recessive characters, but combined in a say that really doesn't add up.
These colonnades lead nowhere, or you don't have the opportunity to know where they lead because the pallet is so somber and shadows fill almost very single one of them other than this one little sliver of blue sky and brick wall, or that of course, this looming, puffing locomotive, which many people have described as ominous or threatening, akin to a caged beast, and there definitely is something of that psychological, emotional tension by positioning this locomotive behind this brick wall.
Following Apollinaire's lead, a number of the surrealist painters and poets like Andre Breton, or Rene Magritte seized upon deChirico's work as a key precursor for what surrealist painting should be. Arrested movement, convulsive beauty of these strange dream states, and I think that's one of the things that The Anxious Journey so beautifully exemplifies.
1913 remains as a year where so many of his signature motifs are first seen.
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