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But I digress! All that to set up some quick thoughts on de Chirico, father of the pittura metafisica school of the 1910s-20s that would directly influence the surrealists. Unlike them, the practitioners of “metaphysical painting” issued no manifestos or politics, just a shared conviction that ordinary objects and spaces held something underneath, something you could only perceive by looking at them sideways.
De Chirico’s work from this period consisted of dreamlike, disquieting scenes set in mostly deserted urban environments, maybe inspired by the streets of Turin and Ferrara though he was based in Paris at the time. The piazzas are rendered with clean draftsmanship and the architecture is solid enough. But shadows often fall at the wrong angle, the perspective tilts past believable, and the afternoon light feels like it’s been there forever, unchanged. The viewer often observes from the shadows. There are discordant arrangements of items: rubber gloves next to classical busts; artichokes in empty courtyards; mannequins standing where people should be. None of it is random - he was building a symbolic language out of ordinary things in the wrong proximity to each other and letting the collision do the work. He called the effect enigma, and spent his whole early career chasing it.
Mystery and Melancholy of a Street (1914) seems to apply all this unease in one place. The viewer is positioned in an elevated spot to watch the distorted scene of a girl rolling a hoop toward a long shadow cast by an unseen figure. The vanishing points don’t agree with each other and the isometric projection of the open trailer adds to the disorientation. The light is golden-hour warm but the sky is nocturnal and reflects nothing back. So many open doorways. The girl is sketched loosely - present but unresolved, like a memory. A sense of timelessness pervades the scene. These are the kind of things that get the mind going, especially during a semester that was 100 percent fine arts and philosophy classes. I remember enjoying having the excuse to make a mediocre copy.
Certainly the great contribution of de Chirico is exemplified in the original. When the surrealists discovered his work, they immediately recognized what he had unlocked: painted space could be psychologically loaded without being expressionistically distorted, and paranoia could be achieved through a kind of logic that defies logical boundaries. Yay! Ernst, Dali, and Magritte would all borrow from this directly. De Chirico would later repudiate them as well as his own groundbreaking work, lurching into full neoclassical from that point forward. The early work was his most important though and has lost none of its power a century later. I’d suggest checking out more of the paintings from his metaphysical days to anybody not familiar with them - they are thought-provoking, convey real atmosphere, and were the visual building blocks of early surrealism.
I’ve always thought it would be fun to paint an “answer” to Mystery and Melancholy that would put the viewer at street level in one of the openings about halfway down the arcade to reveal what is on the other side of the near building (spoiler - I’m pretty sure it includes the statue from The Enigma of a Day) while preserving the tension. In keeping with the spirit of the original it would have to produce more questions than revelations. Haven’t thought through how that would actually work but I ever get around to trying it I’ll put more effort into it than that copy all those years ago.
