Surrealism. Nathalia Brodskaya
of his father, he left for Italy with his mother and brother. De Chirico then discovered the wonderful Italian cities in which the spirit of the Middle Ages still survived – Turin, Milan, Florence, Venice and Verona. Together with his memories of Greece, these cities lay at the basis of his own private world, the one that he created in his painting. The paintings of de Chirico’s youth, in his so-called “Arcade Period”, are fascinating because they possess a quality which avant-garde painting often lacked. De Chirico built the city of his dreams. A white city stood on the shore of a dark-blue sea. Its straight streets were lined with arcades, as in Turin or Ferrara. The streets open out onto the area of a square, decorated with ancient sculpture. But this town was completely empty, uninhabited. Only occasionally could a man be seen in the perspective that was formed by a street; sometimes it is not even a man but only his shadow. In some places a cane that somebody had forgotten was still leaning against a wall. Sometimes a little girl ran about in the street, alone in the empty town. Any man might well have dreamed of such a strange town: it was marvellous. The stone of its buildings and the falling shadows were frighteningly real. And at the same time a secret lived there, a notion of the other world, at whose existence we can try to guess, but which only a select few are privileged to see. The Surrealist poet Paul Éluard devoted these lines to Giorgio de Chirico:
A wall announces another wall
And the shadow protects me from my fearful shadow
O tower of my love around my love
All the walls were running white around my silence.
You, who were you protecting? Impervious and pure sky
Trembling, you sheltered me. The light in relief
Over the sky which is no longer the mirror of the sun
The stars of the day among the green leaves
The memory of those who spoke without knowing
Masters of my weakness and I am in their place
With eyes of love their over-faithful hands
To depopulate a world of which I am absent.[4]
Life gave Giorgio de Chirico another marvellous opportunity: he spent two years in Munich where he studied not only painting, but also classical German philosophy. “In order to have original, extraordinary, perhaps immortal ideas”, wrote Schopenhauer, “it is enough to isolate oneself so completely from the world and from things for a few moments that the most ordinary objects and events should appear to us as completely new and unknown, thereby revealing their true essence.”[5] In Munich he saw a kind of painting which awakened the craving for mystery that lay sleeping in his soul – he got to know [Arnold] Böklin. In 1911 Giorgio de Chirico arrived in Paris and settled in the Montparnasse district, on the Rue Campagne-Premiere. When his paintings appeared at the Salon d’automne, the Parisian artists saw the de Chirico who would later impress them with his Brain of the Child, and who wrote: “What I hear is worth nothing, the only thing that matters is what my eyes see when they are open, and even more when they are shut.”[6] Giorgio de Chirico himself called his art “metaphysical”.
Giorgio de Chirico, Spring in Turin, 1914.
Oil on canvas.
Private Collection.
Giorgio de Chirico, Melancholia, 1912.
Oil on canvas. Estorick Foundation, London.
Giorgio de Chirico turned up in the right place at the right time. For the young people of Montmartre and Montparnasse he became an inspiration and almost a prophet. In 1914 de Chirico depicted Apollinaire in profile against the background of a window. On the poet’s temple he drew a white circle. When Apollinaire went off to the front soon afterwards, he was wounded in the left temple, in the place shown in the picture. The artist had become a visionary for them, with the power to see into the future. Guillaume Apollinaire himself, an ardent advocate of Cubism, a theoretician of art, colour and form, was overwhelmed by the romantic mystery of de Chirico’s paintings. He dedicated a poem to him which was a prototype for the future development in Surrealist literature, and called it “Ocean of Land”.
I have built a house in the middle of the Ocean
Its windows are the rivers that pour out of my eyes
Octopi teem everywhere where the high walls stand
Hear their triple heartbeat and their beak knock against the windows
Damp house
Burning house
Fast season
Season that sings
The aeroplanes lay eggs
Look out they are going to drop anchor
Watch out for the anchor they are dropping
It would be nice if you could come from the sky
The honeysuckle of the sky is climbing
The octopi of the land quiver
And then we are so many and so many to be our own gravediggers
Pale octopi of chalky waves O octopi with pale beaks
Around the house there is this ocean which you know
And which never rests.[7]
Giorgio de Chirico summoned to the surface what had been hidden deep within the art of the beginning of the twentieth century. In the course of the following decades, the spirit of de Chirico found its way into the painting of all the Surrealist artists. References to his pictures turned up in their canvases, mysterious signs and symbols born from his imagination; the mannequins he invented prolonged their lives. However, for the seed of the art of Giorgio de Chirico to be really able to germinate, the young generation of the twentieth century would have to experience a vast upheaval.
Carlo Carrà, The Enchanted Room, 1917.
Oil on canvas, 65 × 52 cm.
Private Collection, Milan.
The War – the Stimulus for Dada
The art of Surrealism was the most direct outcome of its time. Those who created it, literary men and artists, date from the generation that was born in the last decade of the nineteenth century. At the start of the First World War, each of them was about twenty years old. After the monstrous crimes of the Second World War, after the extermination of millions of people in concentration camps and the destruction of Japanese cities with the atomic bomb, previous wars seemed only like distant historical episodes. It is difficult to imagine what a disaster, and in fact what a tragedy, the First World War was. The first years of the twentieth century were marked by outbreaks of conflict in various parts of the world, and there was a sense that people were living on a volcano. Nevertheless, the start of the war came as a surprise. On June 28, 1914, in the Serbian city of Sarajevo, the student Gavrilo Princip killed the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife. A war began in the Balkan; events developed swiftly. On the 1st of August, Russia joined the war against Germany, and on the 3rd and 4th of of the same month, France and Britain declared war on Germany. It was only the defeat of the Germans on the Marne from September 5 to 10 that saved Paris from destruction. At the same time, this led to a drawn-out positional war which turned into a nightmare. Many thousands of young people from every country who took part in the war never returned home, but fell victim to shrapnel, died in the trenches from illnesses, or were poisoned by the gas which the Germans used in the war for the first time in 1916. Many returned as invalids and were later to die as a result of their war wounds. And it was exactly this generation that would create the art of the twentieth century and carry on from the boldest beginnings of its predecessors.
Before
Paul Éluard,
Guillaume Apollinaire,