From Metaphysical Painting to Surrealism

The Metaphysical Art movement in Italy originated in 1910 with the work of Giorgio de Chirico. At that time the artist was in Florence, where he had moved following a period of study at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts. He later went to Paris, and from 1915 to 1916, Ferrara, where he met Carlo Carrà. Fresh from militant Futurism, Carrà modelled his work on De Chirico’s and coined the label “Metaphysical Painting”, which he applied to his own oeuvre.
De Chirico rightly claimed this label for himself, and the definition would apply historically both to his own output from 1910 to 1919 and to that of Carrà in the Ferrara years. Critics have frequently associated Morandi’s early work with the Metaphysical movement, owing to the atmosphere of suspension that pervades his still lifes. But Metaphysical painting would remain quintessentially that of De Chirico, who imbued his skewed perspectives and compositions of what were often highly-disparate objects with an atmosphere of enigma – a word he used as the title for various metaphysical paintings starting from the earliest – mystery and suspension.
De Chirico’s Metaphysical output was continued with variations and repetitions that spanned the artist’s entire career, as well as in the work of his brother, Andrea De Chirico, who took the pseudonym Alberto Savinio.
One consequence of De Chirico’s attachment to Paris was the strong impact that the Metaphysical movement had on French Surrealism, theorized by André Breton in 1924. In fact, via its recourse to the subject – which had been all but eliminated by the Cubist and Abstract painters – and by re-introducing as De Chirico did a “super–real” form of narration, Surrealist painting developed mysterious content and psychoanalytical suggestions of its own, including in relation to the Freudian subconscious. In the late 1920s there was a rupture in relations between De Chirico and Breton, owing to what was dubbed the “Ritorno al Museo” (back to the museum), another pictorial invention by the great De Chirico who, like his brother Savinio, always rejected the label of Surrealist. But this did not lead to any radical breakaway or extraneousness of Surrealism itself from the premises of De Chirico’s Metaphysical work.
One Italian precursor of Surrealism, who was not part of the Metaphysical movement, was Alberto Martini of Vicenza. Another Italian, Fabrizio Clerici, was a follower of both the Metaphysical and Surrealist trends.