| Artist: | Chirico, Giorgio de |
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|---|---|---|
| Title of Work: | Gare Montparnasse (The Melancholy of Departure) | |
| Date of Work: | 1914 | |
| 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 Gare Montparnasse (a train station) into a mysterious space of shadows, platforms, and blind corners; the effect is disorienting and anxious. We see a clock tower and train in the far distance; a bunch of green bananas is oddly placed in the immediate foreground. This bizarre juxtaposition of technology and nature poses an unsettling enigma that cannot be solved. A striped cabanna on the left makes for an odd coupling with the classical arcade behind it. These strange displacements and condensations work with a kind of dream logic that undermines our waking reality; it is in these disquieting ways that de Chirico foreshadows Surrealism. 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. 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. 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 the style is representational, the end result is highly abstract and metaphysical; it is not a landscape so much as a mindscape. Context: the year WWI broke out. 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. | ||
