| Artist: | Chirico, Giorgio de |
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|---|---|---|
| Title of Work: | The Anxious Journey | |
| Date of Work: | 1913 | |
| Nationality: | Italian | |
| Context: | Pre-WWI | |
| Movement: | Italian Metaphysical School | |
| Medium: | Oil | |
| Subject: De Chirico will continually return to the train station to haunt this place of departures. Here he turns the deserted space into a labyrinth of arcades that form a dreamlike maze; the effect is disorienting and anxious. We cannot see around the corner; disembodied, dark shadows take on a menacing life of their own. The image is an enigma; we lose our way in this metaphysical abstraction. Style: de Chirico deliberately uses perspective against itself. Instead of using perspective to create an ordered, measured space, he gives us a surplus of vanishing points and orthogonals that do not line up. As the perspective goes askew, the ground gives way, and our security in a solid, tangible, concrete world is undermined; this slippage in the logic of perspective leaves us with a black hole experience (note the big black shadow in the open threshold on the far right). Renaissance perspective was a system for rationalizing space; de Chirico reverses those terms by turning perspective into an irrational system. He upsets the order of things with a dream logic of odd displacements, condensations, and fetish symbols (the train in the tunnel). Despite the fact that de Chirico's father was an engineer, the artist turns the science of perspective into a science of fantasy. We are left with a weightless world, suspended in a void. Even though his style is representational, the end result is highly abstract and metaphysical; it is not a landscape so much as a mindscape. Context: one year before the outbreak of WWI. Italy is going through its own cultural crisis. It is an old country with a long, rich cultural history caught between its glorious past and its modern present. De Chirico suggests this time warp in his referencing of classical arcades and modern technology (the train). There is a sense of inertia and paralysis in this frozen scene that suggests the dilemma of being stuck in time. De Chirico's disruption of conventional reality and logic foreshadows the Surrealist movement to come. | ||
