Journey inside De Chirico. Part 5

Journey inside De Chirico. Part 5
 

 
Ah! Paris! De Chirico had been there before the war and, even from Ferrara, as we have seen, continued to maintain relations with the intellectual élite of the city, in one of the most culturally effervescent periods of its history. Strangely, De Chirico arrives there right on July 14, the anniversary of the Bastille, in 1911; in 1912 he contributes to an exhibition at the Salon d'Automne (I can not imagine De Chirico taking part in an exhibition in a building dedicated to summer or spring). There were other exhibitions and if the metaphysical painting blooms in Ferrara, as we have seen, it was already born in Florence, moved some of its first steps in Turin and now is strengthened in Paris.The city, in those years, is the destination of the best European intelligentsia: Picasso, Braque, Modigliani, Chagall paint here their canvasses; Matisse still fills his paintings with colors and light (the light of Provence and its gardens), while Mondrian prefers abstract forms; the Futurists, just on 1919, give to the press their Manifesto, in the person of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (it is no accident if the only Italian avant-garde is born in Paris); but other groups of the avant-garde show up in the capital, with the Dadaists Duchamp and Tzara and the Surrealists Miro, Dali and Magritte, both loyal to the Freudian unconscious and its free associations; in the streets of the Latin Quarter there is an Italian student named Giuseppe Ungaretti and at the University a philosopher like Henry Bergson gives his lessons; at 44 rue Hamelin, since October, after a second, heavy removal, Marcel Proust lives and tirelessly corrects his Recherche ; the city goes crazy for the jazz of the "Roaring Twenties", for its continuous parties (even too much: it is the "Moveable feast" described by E.Hemingway, drunken , irreverent, provocative, but concealing the post-war anguish; and it is no coincidence that the nude is a favorite subject of the period), while there are in town Americans like Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda and, indeed, Hemingway; Diaghilev plans his innovative choreography for the Ballets Russes (but there was also the Swedish Ballets of Rolf de Maré); you can hear echoes of the melancholy music by Eric Satie, and walking around you can meet Jean Cocteau, Man Ray and Luis Bunuel.Strangely, however, Paris is not only the capital of the most arrogant avant-garde movements, but also the heart of a return to classicism, which will emerge even better in the '30s: one of its first and most important receptors is precisely De Chirico.

The painter gets acquainted here with Picasso and, above all, with poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who seems ubiquitous when it comes to Italians in Paris (he was a friend of Ungaretti, with whom he shared the room in Rue des Carmes); Apollinaire is so excited about the metaphysical painting that he reviews the exhibition of De Chirico in 1913, describing him (correctly) as "the most astonishing painter of the young generation", and begins to regularly collaborate with him. Indeed, De Chirico presents his new friend to his brother Alberto Savinio, who arrived from Italy in 1914, and the two attend together Les Soirées de Paris. The painter dedicates to the poet the famous portrait below and the poet responds with the poem Océan de Terre (an obvious oxymoron).

The picture was much loved by the poet, which was given to him by Paul Guillaume, of De Chirico's art dealer. Now, among the Surrealists it became famous as a kind of psychic artifact or a premonition on a canvas: in fact, the black shadow on the green background (the usually impossible sky of De Chirico) is Apollinaire, who, like a target, has his temple marked by a clear circle. Well, in 1916, just two years after the drafting of the painting, Apollinaire was wounded during the war by a splinter at the same temple (Neapolitans would wonder: De Chirico brought bad luck?). The Surrealists were fanatics of the unconscious and Symbolism sparks still hovered over Paris: and the idea that the artist may seize something from unknown spheres of reality, is quite symbolist.In the foreground we have a unique marble bust with the black glasses of a blind man, a bust that suggests Homer (I also remember Marlon Brando, but it was too early): the bust is a symbol of the poet, blind, like the ancient prophet, but he is the only one who can reach the inner light of art. In such an enigmatic painting a real puzzle can not miss, and behold, next to the bust there is an oblique stele carved with two bas-reliefs of clear Christian symbolism: the fish (the Greek word was an anagram of Christ) and the shell ( which refers to the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela). De Chirico was sensitive to the supernatural dimension, then the fish and the shell may very well mean the divine dimension the artist longs for.Apollinaire died in Paris in 1918, on November 9, just while Paul Guillaume organized an exhibition of De Chirico, then in Italy, on the stage of the Vieux-Colombier Theatre; the exhibition was introduced by a text by his brother Savinio. Since 1919 De Chirico lived in Rome, but he continued to come and go from Paris and to have contact with local intellectuals: he wrote letters to André Breton, who wrote on his turn the presentation of another exhibition in 1922; in 1924, at the Theatre des Champs Elysees, the artist designed the sets and costumes for the ballet La Giara, taken from the homonymous novel by Pirandello and staged by the Swedish Ballets of Rolf de Maré (Swedish Ballets were active from 1920 to 1925, thanks to this original impresario who, all in all, although in love with dance, was quite new of the field, but who had the merit of gathering the first nucleus of the Museum of dance in Paris and Stockholm). In recent years, our painter was very close to the Surrealists, so that he appears in the famous photograph taken by Man Ray in 1924; yet, he enters into friction with them a few years later.With all these contacts, it is no coincidence that De Chirico settled again in Paris in 1925: his collaborations with artists multiply. In 1928, he illustrates by lithographs Jean Cocteau's monograph, Le Mystère laïc - Essai d'étude indirecte; in 1929 he publishes his autobiographical novel Hebdomeros, the peintre et son génie chez l'écrivain, that is almost painting with words, and he designes the sets and costumes for the ballet Le Bal by Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes; in the '30s, he illustrates by lithographs the Calligrammes of the late Apollinaire.And in Paris for the first time we see the famous mannequins, as in the painting The duo, 1914.

These mannequins are a little more humanized (we are at the beginning ...): their supporting structure is less cumbersome, the legs seem almost normal, they seem to move and even the sky is less gloomy; yet they have no arms, the floor, almost a plateau stage, is always very steep (but how can they not slide down?), the shadow on the right and the red tower on the left frame an enigmatic scene (have you noticed the sea behind? There is always the sea hidden behind De Chirico's backgrounds; and, if the sea is not seen, there is a passing ship, or a tower that looks almost put there for sighting). More than anywhere else we have the impression of being in front of a stage set, complete with a proscenium and a duo, almost puppets, which, by some sentences of the painter himself, meant a duo of actors.Yet, Paris represented to De Chirico a return to the classic, the soul of his youth. In Rome, in the 20s and even later, De Chirico rediscovered the great artists of the past, devoting essays and studies to them; but he still breathed the Mediterranean breeze of his native Greece. That's why our next step must necessarily be Greece: Greece, like in Foscolo's Graces, is the cradle of civilization and can be connected with the great places of subsequent artistic history. We start then our "cruising" to Greece.
Bibliography

Cfr.M.L.Pacelli, L'arte a Parigi negli "Anni folli", http://www.palazzodiamanti.it/932/l-arte-a-parigi-negli-anni-folli.

Biografia di A.De Chirico: http://www.fondazionedechirico.org/biografia/