Giorgio de Chirico

The breakthrough came in Florence in 1910. Recovering from intestinal illness one autumn afternoon, de Chirico sat in Piazza Santa Croce in a state of heightened, almost feverish sensitivity. The sunlit square appeared to him as if for the first time - beautiful, silent, and suffused with a menace he could not name. The painting that followed, "The Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon," launched a decade of work that would transform modern art. His metaphysical pictures - the series of deserted piazzas, the headless mannequins, the elongated shadows, the unexpected train smokestacks on Renaissance horizons - produced an effect of estrangement that no previous painter had managed in quite the same way.

In Paris from 1911 and then in Ferrara during World War I, where he met Carlo Carrà at a military hospital, de Chirico developed and named the style pittura metafisica. The works from this period, among them "The Song of Love" (1914, MoMA) and "The Disquieting Muses" (1916-18), were discovered in the early 1920s by André Breton and became foundational to Surrealism. De Chirico's influence is visible in Ernst, Dalì, Magritte, and in virtually any art that uses spatial dislocation to generate psychological unease.

In 1919 he published a controversial essay calling for a return to traditional craftsmanship, and in the years that followed he shifted toward neoclassicism, old-master technique, and eventually a neo-Baroque manner. The art world, attached to his early metaphysical work, largely dismissed this turn. De Chirico resented the dismissal for the rest of his life, insisting his later painting was more mature. He moved to Rome in 1944, eventually acquiring the house near the Spanish Steps that now operates as the Giorgio de Chirico House Museum. In his final decade he revisited metaphysical themes in his so-called neometaphysical period, using brighter palettes. He was elected to the French Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1974 and died in Rome on 20 November 1978, aged 90.

On the auction market, de Chirico appears on Auctionist primarily through Italian houses: Wannenes Art Auctions (13 items) and Pandolfini Casa d'Aste (5 items) account for most of the 21 total items. The works span drawings, paintings, prints, and sculptures, reflecting the breadth of his practice across media. Top recorded results include 80,000 EUR for "La grande torre" (oil on cardboard, early 1970s), 12,000 EUR for a pencil and watercolor "Piazza d'Italia" from 1972, and multiple theatre set designs at around 10,000-10,400 EUR.