Pittura Metafisica

The Disquieting Muses
 Giorgio de Chirico

Style of painting that flourished c. 1910–20 in the works of the Italian painters Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà (1881–1966). The movement began with Chirico, whose dreamlike works with sharp contrasts of light and shadow often had a vaguely threatening, mysterious quality. Chirico, his younger brother Alberto Savinio, and Carrà formally established the school and its principles in 1917. Their representational but bizarre and incongruous imagery produces disquieting effects and had a strong influence on Surrealism in the 1920s.

Term applied to the work of Giorgio De Chirico and Carlo Carrà before and during World War I and thereafter to the works produced by the Italian artists who grouped around them. Pittura Metafisica was characterized by a recognizable iconography: a fictive space was created in the painting, modelled on illusionistic one-point perspective but deliberately subverted. In de Chirico’s paintings this established disturbingly deep city squares, bordered by receding arcades and distant brick walls; or claustrophobic interiors, with steeply rising floors. Within these spaces classical statues and, most typically, metaphysical mannequins (derived from tailors’ dummies) provided a featureless and expressionless, surrogate human presence. Balls, coloured toys and unidentifiable solids, plaster moulds, geometrical instruments, military regalia and small realistic paintings were juxtaposed on exterior platforms or in crowded interiors and, particularly in Carrà’s work, included alongside the mannequins. In the best paintings these elements were combined to give a disconcerting image of reality and to capture the disquieting nature of the everyday.

The Song of life
Giorgio de Chirico

Several major artists were attracted by this development: Mario Sironi’s totemic mannequins turned into brooding solitary figures; and Felice Casorati used steep perspectives leading to dark interiors as the settings for his models. In Germany the impact of the two Valori plastici travelling exhibitions (1921 and 1924) was considerable. Featureless mannequins began to appear in the work of George Grosz, Rudolf Schlichter and Oskar Schlemmer. The effect was felt most profoundly, however, by Max Ernst. On his arrival in Paris in 1922, Ernst’s painting reflected the admiration of his poet friends for de Chirico. At that time only one painter, Pierre Roy (a pre-war friend of de Chirico), showed the influence of metaphysical art, but the painters who became Surrealists after Ernst almost all passed through a period of stylistic debt to de Chirico, notably Salvador Dalí and Alberto Giacometti (the leading creators of the Surrealist Object), René Magritte and Paul Delvaux.

These groups—Novecento Italiano in Italy, Magic Realism in Germany and international Surrealism—carried the style into the 1930s. Although Carrà occasionally painted metaphysical works, it was only in the paintings of Savinio and de Chirico that the philosophical background of Pittura Metafisica persisted.