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Childhood Play in the Metaphysical Painting of Giorgio de Chirico

Laureane Urbain

12/03/13

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Giorgio de Chirico was a great artist born in Greece of Italian parents, and lived there until he

was seventeen. Later after the death of his father when he was just a school boy, he moved to Munich,

Germany with his mother in 1906 where he attended artistic studies, however they did not seem to

interest him as much as the fantastic imagery of German Symbolist artists such as Arnold Bocklin, Max

Klinger, and Alfred Kubin . These artists sparked in Chirico a longing for an art that would give “‘the1

sensation of something new, of something, that previously, I have not known’”. Here is the birth of2

Chirico’s Metaphysical art period occurring during his earliest years of painting, between 1911 to 1919.

In addition, Chirico became fascinated by the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, also known as a

critique of the ancients, a first existentialist, and a provocative spirit of the avant gardes. Nietzsche had

expressed his own “foreboding that underneath this reality in which we live and have our being, another

and altogether different reality lies concealed” in his writings of The Birth of Tragedy (1872). After3

Chirico’s move to Paris in July of 1911, he became sick and frustrated with the obsession over the

Impressionist painting of mere sunlight on everyday objects and chose to abide by Nietzsche's

expectation in that art “must distort reality for reality is intolerable. The artist, so as to be able to live in

this world of real contingencies, rebuilds and recreates it by raising up an unknown world of beauty

which he enjoys with delight”. Chirico decided to rebuild and recreate his world, to portray this4

alternate, yet coexisting reality through vast landscapes with Ancient Greco architecture, still lifes of

1 George Heard Hamilton, “Dada and Surrealism”, in Painting and Sculpture in Europe 1880­1940 (NewHaven: Yale University Press, 1993): 392.2 Giorgio de Chirico in George Heard Hamilton, “Dada and Surrealism”, in Painting and Sculpture in Europe1880­1940 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993): 392; Originally from a manuscript by de Chirico, trans.James Thrall Soby, in Giorgio de Chirico (New York, 1955): 244­50.3 Friedrich Nietzsche in George Heard Hamilton, “Dada and Surrealism”, in Painting and Sculpture in Europe1880­1940 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993): 392; Originally from The Birth of Tragedy (1872)4 Robert Curtius in James Thrall Soby, in The Early Chirico (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1941): 8.;Originally published in “Nietzsche's Aesthetics”, in Formes, No II (Paris, 1931): 6.

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everyday objects, and suspensions of time with shadows in his paintings. James Thrall Soby expresses

in his book The Early Chirico how “Chirico wanted to relight the world, to restore to objects their

look of the uncanny, to give painting the bright and disturbing clarity ‘of the dream and of the child

mind’”. So in addition to emphasizing the “metaphysical” of Nietzsche, the creation of Chirico’s world5

also runs parallel to the alternate realities created by children in their imaginative play. Even the subjects

of Chirico’s works, including juxtaposing still lifes of everyday objects and the recurring symbol of the

train, not only coincide with Chirico’s childhood specifically, but with the theories of children’s play and

children’s toys in general.

A large part of Chirico’s definition of “metaphysical” has to do with the objects of our day to

day life, and this is why he included such objects in his paintings. He believed that “the painted object

has no value in itself, if not as a significant referant to a broader argument: it is a stage in a cognitive

journey (it is a question)”. Chirico wants the object to evoke thought other than that of the logical held6

in the real world. Therefore he places these objects in unlikely juxtapositions of space and arrangement,

completely removing the object from its banal meaning and giving it a new one in his own metaphysical

world. In The Song of Love (1915) (Fig. 1), Chirico depicts a green ball in the foreground, a canvas

pinned with a red, plastic glove to the right and an ancient greco­roman styled bust to the left in the

midground, and in the background a building of tall archways and a cityscape with a twilight sky. Not

only is the assemblage abnormal, but the scale of each object is unrealistic. The red glove is as large as

the bust and the ball not that much smaller. Both aspects allow the viewer to engage in the questioning

Chirico believes to be the most salient part of the metaphysical world, to question the object and its

5 James Thrall Soby, in The Early Chirico (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1941): 22.Giorgio de Chirico in James Thrall Soby in The Early Chirico (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1941):22.; Originally published in André Breton, in Le surréalisme et la peinture (Paris, 1988): 38.6 Paolo Levi, “De Chirico, Metaphysics and Incompleteness”, in Giorgio de Chirico 1920­1950 (Stampato,Italy: Electa, 1991): 20.

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logic in the real world. As a whole, he wants to make art truly immortal by escaping all human limits

because logic and common sense will only interfere. Once these barriers are broken art will enter the

regions of childhood vision and dream. In relation to illogical placement, Dorothy and Jerome Singer7

discuss the term “Juxtaposing Reasoning” introduced by leading “play” researcher Jean Piaget and

how it characterizes the preoperational stage (which is from birth to age seven) : “[Juxtaposing

Reasoning] refers to the idiosyncratic or arbitrary way in which a child relates parts to a whole. When

Piaget asked a five year old to group together objects that were alike, the child placed a woman next to

a fir tree, a bench against a house, and a church together with a small tree and a motorcycle but with no

understanding of why he had put these particular objects together”. According to Piaget’s experiment,

the child’s play of Juxtaposition Reasoning is very similar to the juxtaposition of objects in Chirico’s

works. Though the child does not understand as to why they may put these objects together, Chirico

certainly did. Chirico wants to provide an element of chance and surprise. He states in Meditations of a

Painter (1912), “the revelation of a work of art is the proof of metaphysical reality of certain chance

occurrences that we sometimes experience in a way and manner that something appears to us and

provokes in us an image of a work of art, an image, which in our souls awakens surprise ­­ sometimes,

meditation ­­ often, and always, the joy of creation.” These objects­­ the bust, the glove and the green8

ball­­ are placed on this canvas by chance to not only emphasize the ambiguity of the object in the

metaphysical world but to awaken the viewer by such illogical placement. At the time Chirico is

frustrated and bored with the painting of everyday life by the Impressionists and wants to evoke the

7 Giorgio de Chirico “Mystery and Creation, 1913”, trans. London Bulletin, No 6 (October 1938), in Theoriesof Modern Art: A Source Book of Artists and Critics, ed. Herschel B Chipp (Los Angeles: University ofCalifornia Press, Berkeley, 1996): 401.; Originally published in André Breton, in Le surréalisme et la peinture(Paris, 1988): 38­39.8 Giorgio de Chirico “Meditations of a Painter, 1912”, trans. Louis Bougeois and Robert Goldwater, inTheories of Modern Art: A Source Book of Artists and Critics, ed. Herschel B Chipp (Los Angeles:University of California Press, Berkley, 1996): 398.

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viewer by something they see everyday but not in its everyday setting or arrangement. Even the fact that

the bust and glove are pinned on a “Giorgio de Chirico” signed canvas within the canvas emphasizes the

questioning of reality, later the notion to be expressed similarly by surrealist René Magritte in The

Human Condition (1933). Thus depicting these objects in juxtaposing arrangements, Chirico verifies a

counter reality which children accept with passionate belief, but which adults reject solely because they

find it intangible.

Many of these objects depicted in Chirico’s works are similar to those of children’s toys as

well. During the 1880s, the toy industry expanded due to the country’s advancing technology and

prosperity and children were given more freedom and more opportunities for play. Soby describes9

Chirico as a man who “was able to recapture in paint the particular intensity of minutiae flaring bright in

the brain of a child. For many years of his adult life he retained the sense of magic in objects which

customarily develops and fades in youth”.10

In The Evil Genius of a King (1914­1915) (Fig. 2), from the bottom of the canvas to the top,

a ball­like object, a crane or toy fishing rod, a odd bug­like wooden object, and what looks like a

stuffed animal’s head and forepaw are placed on an extremely angled ramp that cuts through the center

of the composition. The ramp is severed by another red wall that shadows onto another object that is

somehow lit and in the background is a robust greco inspired building of dark arches. The viewer’s

attention however focuses on the toys for they are directly lit by the source of light from the top right

corner. The light intensifies the bright colors of red, green, blue and yellow to emphasize the visual

stimulation this toy would have to a child. The chiaroscuro Chirico uses on each object emphasizes its

three dimension so well that one could pluck the ball from the canvas and bounce it in the gallery space.

9 Dorothy and Jerome Singer, “The High Season of Imaginative Play”, in The House of Make Believe:Children’s Play and the Developing Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990): 83.10 James Thrall Soby, in The Early Chirico (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1941): 6.

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“The objects themselves carry the intensity of meaning with which children invest their play things” as

Soby would describe it . So the light that hits these objects almost creates a holiness that could be11

Chirico’s reflection in how a child sees a toy. In “A Philosophy of Toys” Charles Baudelaire reminisces

on his childhood experience of selecting a precious toy from a wealthy woman’s collection and

discusses such awe said to be “the overriding desire of children to get at and see the soul of their toys”.

In this statement Baudelaire implies how children can see more than what meets the eye in a toy and12

does not “blame this infantile mania; it is the first metaphysical tendency”. Children desperately wish to13

see the alter reality of the object, as if it is alive and always changing. In his depiction of toys, Chirico

tries to portray the same desperation of more through juxtaposition and toy­like objects because of

their direct connection to child’s play and acceptance to an alter reality.

One object specifically makes a recurring appearance in the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico, the

train. They either coast along the horizon almost part of the desolate metaphysical landscape such as in

Lassitude of the Infinite (1912) (Fig. 3) or as a main figure that stands sturdily like the architecture as

in The Anxious Journey (1913) (Fig. 4). Mentioned before, the late nineteenth century boomed in toy

production and amongst them was that of the miniature steel toy train. Toy trains may have had a special

significance for Chirico in his childhood. His fascination is evident in the small sketches he had done of

toy trains in the playroom snaking through other nursery toys. The toy allowed him to mimic his father14

who had been an engineer sent to Greece to lay out the first railroad on the Thessalian Coast.15

Unfortunately he endured the premature passing of his father when he was just a school boy. The

11 Ibid, 33.12 Charles Baudelaire, “A Philosophy of Toys”, in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. ed.Jonathan Mayne (New York: Phaidon Limited Press, 1965): 202.13 Ibid.14 James Thrall Soby, in The Early Chirico (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1941): 28.15 Ibid.

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repetitive depictions of trains in his works creates a symbolic connection between Chirico and his father.

This could be described as a repetitive tendency of Fenichel (1945) discussed by Phyllis Greenacre in

“Play in Relation to Creative Imagination”. First, Greenacre explains as to how the human tendency of

repetitive activity is not a restriction of play but is an outlet. Fenichel believed in three different

categories of repetitive tendencies of human behavior, the one most associated with child’s play and

dreams being the repetition of traumatic experiences for the purpose of achieving a belated mastery. The

trauma of his father’s death is that expressed in Chirico’s trains. “Because the repetition is painful, the

individual simultaneously wishes to avoid it. A compromise may be the result; the repetition is on a

smaller scale or under somewhat more favorable conditions, ie, in play” and for Chirico, as well as in

art. The recurring appearance of trains in his artwork is the childlike coping mechanism of his father’s16

death. Every time Chirico paints a train not only is he paying homage to a father who he adored as a

child, but as a comfort in the ritual of him always present in his future and his success.

In The Lassitude of the Infinite, one can barely notice the train for it is so receded into the

back of the almost empty piazza that it almost looks like a dark mountain range with a single cloud

above. With the receded horizon, the piazza appears to be vast and amid a melancholy silence which

evokes a longing for any sound, especially that of the train. Here the melancholy that surrounds his

fathers death is more evident. He longs for the father figure that guided him with his drawings and so

decides to paint the train in passing, but forever still and quiet, almost suspended in time as to not let go

of what it symbolizes. As for in The Anxious Journey, the train is in frontal view behind a brick wall in

the composition’s back left corner with the foreground composed of alternating archways of a building.

Because it is the only object other than the architecture, the train has more of a presence, a power: the

16 Phyllis Greenacre, “Play in Relation to Creative Imagination” in Vol 14 of The Psychoanalytic Study of theChild (New York: International Universities Press, Inc, 1959): 64.

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authority figure. The commonality of its placement behind a brick wall also gives the train an aspect of

being mythical. Soby states “The train has in fact a hold over popular imagination which the automobile

has scarcely rivalled and which only the airplane may someday exceed”. Here Soby implies that the17

train has a sort of majestic quality that is rooted in the imagination. Chirico’s trains have a mythical

element for they are either suspended in time, neither going to or from some place, or they are placed

amongst architecture of tall archways, staring at the viewer as the only figure. Perhaps it is their eerily

silent locomotion, but these trains “lack some property which would make them real and common place,

therefore they are wholly right as part of Chirico’s tenebrow world”.18

This “tenebrow world” Chirico creates is the signature of his success. In 1910, art critic Gordon

Onslow­Ford called this other place, this other reality “Chirico City” ­ a world of “silent squares,

peopled with statues and shadows and bounded far horizons, a world of elegiac beauty and vast

dignity”. The vast space, long afternoon shadows and, suspension of time became iconographic as the19

symbols of the metaphysical world for Chirico. The creation of such a seperate reality is common to that

of a child’s imaginative play.

One of Chirico’s most famous examples of his metaphysical world is that in The Melancholy

and Mystery of a Street (1914) (Fig. 5). The imposing facade of a dark building and its shadow

dominate the foreground while an extended white wall on the left gives the illusion of depth, an

exaggerated perspective foreshortening the vanishing point, creating an ominous sense of unreality, of

sur­reality through spacial distortion. In the only ray of lights which cuts diagonally across the

composition, along the white wall’s facade, there is a girl in the right bottom corner running with a stick

17 James Thrall Soby, in The Early Chirico (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1941): 28.18 Ibid.19 Gordon Onslow Ford in James Thrall Soby, in The Early Chirico (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company,1941): 15.

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and bicycle rim along this hallway of light towards the shadow of another figure unseen. Again the

shadow of this figure is eerie and ominous for the figure is unknown to the viewer.

With the girl, Chirico provides a protagonist for his world which entices the viewer to follow her

progress, although the ominous tone of her surroundings suggest that there is none to be expected. So

similar to the social aspect found in the social pretend play discussed by Greenacre, this other

metaphysical world is a way Chirico can engage with his viewers. He wants them to see the symbolic20

role of the girl in this world, which is that of an ominous future. In Mystery and Creation (1913),

Chirico expresses his intuitive foreboding of the future by saying, “Perhaps the most amazing sensation

passed to us by prehistoric man is that of presentiment”. However in his art, he creates his own world,21

like that of a child, where he can be the decision­maker so to say. Chirico finds the same pleasure in his

control over his painting as a child finds control in his play as the superior figure, discussed by

Greenacre. For instance, Chirico chooses to portray the girl in mid­motion as if this was a moment in22

time captured once to last forever. The fact that Chirico can control this motion, this freeze in time, gives

the audience a sense of his authority over the metaphysical reality he depicts. Soby connects the figure

of the girl with the hoop with another found in the Impressionist Georges Seurat’s La Grande Jatte and

states that Chirico most likely admired the artist for his ability to freeze his figures to withstand time, to

make them immortal. Therefore having similar control of what occurs in his painting, Chirico is also23

able to have control over the past melancholic experiences the objects and figures represent. So even

20 Phyllis Greenacre, “Play in Relation to Creative Imagination” in Vol 14 of The Psychoanalytic Study of theChild (New York: International Universities Press, Inc, 1959): 72.21 Giorgio de Chirico “Mystery and Creation, 1913”, trans. London Bulletin, No 6 (October 1938), in Theoriesof Modern Art: A Source Book of Artists and Critics, ed. Herschel B Chipp (Los Angeles: University ofCalifornia Press, Berkeley, 1996): 401.22 Phyllis Greenacre, “Play in Relation to Creative Imagination” in Vol 14 of The Psychoanalytic Study of theChild (New York: International Universities Press, Inc, 1959): 64.23 James Thrall Soby, in The Early Chirico (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1941): 44.

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though the girl with the hoop is approaching a dark and ominous unknown figure and is surrounded by

dark shadows, Chirico uses his power to freeze whatever horrible event from happening. The audience

will never know what will happen, not even Chirico himself. Similar to a child’s game not going his way,

Chirico saw that the result of the girl meeting the shadow would not please him, so he simply decided to

stop her in the action.

Another aspect of a child’s imaginative play is the child choosing the role they play in their

world, and not just as the creator. A category of play devised by the Singers in their experiments was

that of the roles assumed in a child’s imaginative play: mother, father, baby, super­hero, victim, etc. In24

The Child’s Brain (1914) (Fig. 6), Chirico provides a frightening portrait of his deceased father, drawn

from the dark fear of his childhood. The figure’s skin is bare and that of pallor, contrasting with jet black

hair and mustache. He stands behind a curtain, his left side hidden and a table with a book placed in

front of him. Behind him, a window shows the dark architecture outside and the sky of a rising sun as

light chases the dark. However the viewer is drawn to the face because of one abnormal characteristic ­

the eyes are closed. The face of the father is purposefully strikingly similar to that of Chirico’s. Though

the atmosphere is frightening, the face is calm and takes on the relaxation of dreaming, of removing

oneself from the exterior to focus on the interior. Chirico greatly respected, admired, and feared his

father. In this portrait, he allows his own to show through as he tries to take his father’s role in his

metaphysical world. He knows that he could never take on the legacy of his father in reality so like a

child, he knows he can assume this position for it is he who created this metaphysical world in his

paintings and it is he who can choose his role in its society.

With the enlightening theories of Nietzsche, Giorgio de Chirico wants to achieve the universal

24 Dorothy and Jerome Singer, “The High Season of Imaginative Play”, in The House of Make Believe:Children’s Play and the Developing Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990): 73.

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understanding of a metaphysical world, a world where nothing is quite as it seems, where logic is an

obstacle to exciting and surprising the soul. Against the nineteenth century tradition of direct observation

in art, Chirico states,“What is most of all necessary is to rid art of everything it has held until now,; every

subject, idea, thought and symbol must be put aside… Thought must so far detach itself from human

fetters, that things may appear under a new aspect as though they are illuminated by a constellation now

appearing for the first time.” Appearing for the first time like in the eyes of an innocent child. To do25

so, Chirico juxtaposes familiar objects in illogical ensembles and spaces like in The Love Song to

portray an intangible world that only children would accept. He uses common day toys of bright colors

and realistic chiaroscuro to emphasize how a child must view such objects in awe and long for there to

be something more, like a soul. Chirico expresses his inner struggle of accepting his father’s death

through one of his favorite toys, the toy train, by painting trains as an iconographic symbol of his

childhood, a repetitive tendency children use in their own play to overcome their traumas, a compromise

to turn pain into pleasure. But most importantly, Chirico has created a world where he can decide his

role in society, whether as creator or authority father figure. Chirico’s metaphysical painting relates to

the child’s tendencies of imaginative play. The Singers believe that “play enables children to make sense

of their world by bringing it down to size.” But through the child’s play theories displayed in his26

artwork, it seems that Giorgio de Chirico is trying to encourage his audience to explore the illogical and

ambiguity of our world, rather than to make sense of it.

25 Giorgio de Chirico in James Thrall Soby, in The Early Chirico (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1941):21.; Originally published by Roger Vitrac, in Georges de Chirico (Paris 1927): 12.26 Dorothy and Jerome Singer, “The High Season of Imaginative Play”, in The House of Make Believe:Children’s Play and the Developing Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990): 67.

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Appendix

Figure 1The Song of Love, 1914, ARTstor

Figure 2The Evil Genius of a King, 1914­15, ARTstor

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Figure 3The Lassitude of the Infinite, 1912, James Thrall Soby in The Early Chirico (Plate 7)

Figure 4The Anxious Journey, 1913, ARTstor

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Figure 5The Melancholy and Mystery of a Street, 1914, ARTstor

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Figure 6The Child’s Brain, 1914, James Thrall Soby in The Early Chirico (Plate 30)