Giorgio De Chirico The Changing Face Of Metaphysical Art

Like autumnal fruits we are now ripe for the new metaphysics...We are explorers ready for new departures...It is time... "Gentelmen, all aboard!" (Giorgio de Chirico, "Zeusi l'esploratore," Valori Plastici, Rome, November 1918).
On 1 January 1919 - one hundred years ago - Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978), one of the 20th century's most important and contraversial artists, arrived in Rome on the overnight train from Ferrara where he had been posted for military service for the last three and a half years. Celebrating the upcoming New Year, it also marked the start of a new, all-important chapter in the self-styled Pictor optimus' career, which embraced classicism and the great masters.
The year 1919 would also soon be used by thr Surrealists and subsequent critics as the cut-off point for de Chirico's early Metaphysical painting (1910-18) - a period of creative genius that exerted a key influence on the imminent birth of Surrealism with de Chirico championed as its precursor - and the beggining of his "later" work that spanned nearly sixty years.
Consistent with the position that de Chirico always maintained, this publication and its examination of about a hundred works executed throughout the artist's career, highlights how his post-1918 production (irrespective of changes in style, technique, subject matter, and tonality) evolves from hisnearliet Metaphysical work along increasingly sophisticated lines:una metafisica continua (a recurrent type of Metaphysical art). Conceived as an ongoing dialogue where the past and present coexist on the same plane in a sort of Nietzschean eternal return, the so-called volte-face of his work 1919 does not deal with repudiation, reaction or revolution, but renaissance: the endless rebirth of metaphysical discovery.