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Giorgio de Chirico and the Metaphysical City

Giorgio de Chirico and the Metaphysical City

Giorgio de Chirico and the Metaphysical City

$65.00

DE CHIRICO. Merjian, Ara

Cl. New Haven, 2014

Book ID: 81124

Painted in Paris on the eve of World War One, the Metaphysical cityscapes of Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) redirected the course of modernist painting and the modern architectural imagination alike. Giorgio de Chirico and the Metaphysical City examines the two most salient dimensions of the artists early imagery: its representations of architectural space and its sustained engagement with the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Centering upon a single painting from 1914 Ð deemed by the painter the fatal year Ð each chapter examines why and how de Chirico's self-declared Nietzschean method takes architecture as its pictorial means and metaphor. The first, full-length study in English to focus on the painter's seminal work from pre-war Paris, the book places de Chirico's literary images back in the context of the city's avant-garde, particularly the circle of Guillaume Apollinaire. Merjian's study sheds light on one of the most influential and least understood figures in 20th-century aesthetics, while also contributing to an understanding of Nietzsche's paradoxical consequences for modernism.

288 pp.