Giorgio de Chirico

Giorgio de Chirico was born in Volos, Greece, in 1888 to Italian parents, and studied in Athens and at the Munich Academy, where Böcklin and Nietzsche shaped his imagination. In Paris from 1911 he painted the empty piazzas, long shadows, mannequins and towers of Pittura Metafisica — pictures that Apollinaire championed and that the Surrealists later claimed as their founding revelation.

After the First World War he turned to the Old Masters, provoking a lasting quarrel with Breton; the 1920s and 1930s brought the horses on the shore, the archaeologists and the gladiators painted for Léonce Rosenberg.

From 1944 de Chirico lived in Rome, in the house on Piazza di Spagna that is now his museum, painting neo-Baroque self-portraits and still lifes, remaking his own metaphysical pictures and, in his last decade, the ‘neo-metaphysical’ works. He also made prints and lithographs throughout his career.

He died in Rome in 1978. His work is in every major museum of modern art, from MoMA to the Centre Pompidou and the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna.