Memories of My Life by Giorgio De Chirico

  • Year2017
  • LanguageRussian
  • TranslateЕ.Tarakanova
  • Edition4000
  • Pages368
  • BindingHardcover
  • Price810 RUB
Buy book
Garage publishing program in collaboration with Ad Marginem Press

Memoirs by one of the biggest artists of the twentieth century have been published in Russian in their entirety for the first time.

The volume includes two books of De Chirico’s memoirs, the first dating back to the mid 1940s, and the second to early 1960s. 

Telling the story of his evolution as an artist and explaining his philosophical and aesthetic outlook, De Chirico reveals the mind of a Renaissance man and a brilliant intellectual. Curiously, as one of the important artists of the avant-garde, the founder of metaphysical painting and participant of radical movements of the 1910s–1920s, such as Surrealism and Dadaism, in his reminiscences De Chirico effectively renounces his modernist past, his former ideas and connections. Dismissing Van Gogh, Matisse, Cezanne and other visionaries of the early twentieth century as pseudo geniuses, De Chirico chooses to distance himself from the avant-garde and to join the classical tradition (he even uses the Latin term pictor classicus meaning “classical artist”).    

This explains De Chirico's paradoxical account of his own choice of subjects and his unique style, linking his trademark towers and squares, his statues and columns, the steam from a train that seems to be frozen in the air, the sun-drenched landscapes with broken perspective and disproportionate shadows to the philosophy of Schopenhauer, Weininger, and Nietzsche.

I tried to express the strong and mysterious feeling I had discovered in the books of Nietzsche: the melancholy of beautiful autumn days, afternoons in Italian cities.

Chronologically organised, the work offers a detailed account of the key episodes in the artist’s career: his first painterly experiments; his studies under Klinger in Germany; his work for Diaghilev's Les Ballets Russes; travels to Milan, Florence, Venice, Rome, Paris, Munich, Amsterdam, New York, and many other cities including Turin, which inspired many of his paintings; finally, the story of his only novel (Hebdomeros, 1929). Together, these episodes add up to a fascinating story that will be of interest to a wide audience

Author

Giorgio De Chirico (1888–1978) was an Italian artist, best known for his metaphysical paintings. Born to an Italian family in Greece, he studied painting in Athens and Florence. In 1906, he moved to Munich, where he discovered the philosophy of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and the painting of Klinger and Böcklin. In 1910, De Chirico moved to Paris and became close with Picasso and Apollinaire, but returned to Italy after the start of World War I. In 1917, he met artist Carlo Carrà in a military hospital and the two co-founded the metaphysical painting movement. De Chirico’s works from this period have had a major influence on surrealist artists, including Salvador Dalí and René Magritte

Gallery

Share