About the Artist
Giorgio de Chirico
Giorgio de Chirico (1888 – 1978) was an Italian artist and writer. De Chirico was born in Volos, Greece, to a Genoan mother and a Sicilian father. In the years before World War I, he founded the Scuola Metafisica art movement, which profoundly influenced the surrealists. After 1919, he became interested in traditional painting techniques, and worked in a neoclassical or neo-Baroque style, while frequently revisiting the metaphysical themes of his earlier work. In the paintings of his metaphysical period, de Chirico developed a repertoire of motifs—empty arcades, towers, elongated shadows, mannequins, and trains among others—that he arranged to create "images of forlornness and emptiness" that paradoxically also convey a feeling of "power and freedom".
