GIORGIO DE CHIRICO (1888-1978) THE MUSE, 1974 Oil... Lot 4

GIORGIO DE CHIRICO (1888-1978) THE MUSE, 1974 Oil on paper mounted on panel Signed lower right Oil on paper laid on panel; signed lower right 25,4 x 18,3 CM - 10 x 7 1/4 IN. A certificate from the Giorgio e Isa de Chirico Foundation will be given to the buyer. PROVENANCE Sale, Briest Scp, Paris, 18 April 1991, lot 149. Acquired during this sale by the present owner. Private collection, Belgium. EXHIBITION Paul Delvaux. Aux sources de l'œuvre, Brussels, Ixelles Museum, 1 October 2010 - 16 January 2011. RELATED WORKS The Morning of the Muse (Il mattino della musa), 1973, watercolour on cardboard, 36 x 25 CM, Giorgio e Isa de Chirico Foundation, Rome The Morning of the Muses (Il mattino delle muse), 1972, oil on canvas, 80 x 60 CM, Giorgio e Isa de Chirico Foundation, Rome "But now this figure and this shadow became gradually obsessive and began to take a prominent place in my mind. Now this shadow plays an important role in my life. Giorgio de Chirico "The void is the main spring of the fantastic, precisely because nothing happens, the possible place of all possible actions, the place of expectation. The void is associated with anguish, because a void means the possibility of a sudden, unforeseen irruption, of a terrible or at least surprising nature. [It is frightening because it can evoke an abandoned place, from which all life has withdrawn, a dead city, a deserted country, where a dramatic action has taken place that has made the void, destroying all that was alive; it is even more frightening when in these ruins or in this new city, untouched and uninhabited, something will happen..." Giorgio de Chirico. With Carlo Carrà, he formulated the aesthetics of the "Pittura metafisica", a painting that projected onto the canvas metaphysical spaces of deep melancholy, of great solitude, charged with an anguish present in the smallest corners. These are Kafkaesque settings immersed in melancholic colours. The objects unfold a threatening life. The expressive power of the empty and silent spaces is further enhanced when the sculptures are replaced by "manichini" (mannequins), ghosts of leather and wood. Shadows whose origin remains unknown fall on the squares. Placed in these empty spaces, the mannequins become anonymous idols. The strangeness of familiar objects is complete. What produces it, the fact that they are placed in an environment to which they do not belong and in which their presence is not expected, creates the shock of disillusion. The viewer is forced to perceive a second dreamlike reality and to confront it. This paradoxical and illogical collusion between contradictory realms, whose inventor De Chirico expressly cites is Nietzsche, would later become the foundation of the Surrealist aesthetic. For De Chirico, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer "were the first to teach the profound meaning of the meaninglessness of life." 1 1 Ingo F. Walther, Ruhrberg, Schneckenburger, Fricke, Honnef, Art in the 20th Century, Taschen, Köhln, 2014, p. 139