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 artist’s early imagery: its representations of architectural space and its sustained engagement with the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Centering upon a single painting from 1914 – deemed by the painter “the fatal year” – 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.

Gathered from early twentieth-century Italian magazines, manuscripts, correspondence, television recordings, and ephemeral art volumes, Geometry of Shadows is the first comprehensive collection of Giorgio de Chirico's Italian poetry, with award-winning poet Stefania Heim's translations presented alongside the Italian originals.

The self-named metaphysical painting of early 20th-century painter Giogio de Chirico continues to haunt modern art. Paolo Baldacci's long-awaited monograph follows de Chirico and his work from his birth through his student years in Paris to his return to Italy. Baldacci details the development of de Chirico's mature style and reveals the many biographical elements of his paintings. 250 color and 150 b&w illustrations.

Twenty-one essays examining the relationship of surrealist thought to architectural theory and practice.

"Hebdomeros, originally written in French by Giorgio de Chirico and published in Paris in 1929, was immediately accepted by critics as one of the capital novels of surrealist literature. It should also be said that Hebdomeros is a fundamental document for better understanding the artistic revolution that De Chirico operated in those years with his metaphysical painting. The story does not proceed from event to event, but passes from one image, from one word, from one analogy to another. The singularity of this process lies in its distance from both the dream and the interior monologue, it does not involve the reader, but seduces him with a spectacle of images that smell of hallucination and dreams, of vanishing anguish and frigid rhetorical invention."--Www.goodreads.com

Greek-born Italian painter Giorgio De Chirico (1888-1978) was hugely influential in the early years of the Surrealist movement. His paintings during the teens in Paris, where he moved in 1911, caused such a stir that such important figures as Picasso and Paul Eluard immediately praised them. This phase of his work, which he later termed pittura metafisica (metaphysical painting) was marked by dramatic compositions involving sharp perspective, striking shadows, geometrical planes, voids of space, and a general feeling of anxiety and loneliness; the sense of absurdity evoked by the mannequin-like figures in almost nightmarish landscapes seemed to suggest a Freudian expression of the unconscious. After 1930, De Chirico turned to a more classical style of painting and continued in the same vein for the rest of his career; his later work was widely criticized, especially by the Surrealists who had so admired his early paintings.

C. Heck and K. Lippincott, Symbols of Time in the History of Art: Introduction; A. Acres, Small Physical History: Trickling Past of Early Netherlandish Painting; B. Winston Blackmun, 'From Time Immemorial': Historicism in the Court art of Benin, Nigeria; S. Blumenroder, Andrea Mantegna's Grisaille Paintings: Colour Metamorphosis as a Metaphor for History; K. Enz Finken, An Early Christian Construction of Time: Salvation History in the Catacomb of Callistus in Rome; M. Wellington Gahtan, Notions of Past and Future in Italian Renaissance Art and Letters; P. Gerrish Nunn, Time and Tide wait for no man: a Victorian apocalypse; J. M. Greenstein, Faces in Time: Temporalities of the Sitter in Renaissance Portraits; J. Berger Hochstrasser, Goede Dingen Willen Tijt Hebben: Time as a Meditation on Painting in Dutch Still Life of the Seventeenth Century; P. Junod, Figures du Temps au siecle de l'histoire; W. Pullan, Death and Praxis in the Funerary Architecture of Mamluk Cairo; S. Sun, The Symbols of Seasonal Changes from Winter to Spring in East Asian Paintings; D. Motycka Weston, 'The Hour of the Enigma': The Phenomenal Temporality in the Metaphysical Painting of Giorgio de Chirico.

Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) was best known for his metaphysical paintings, but he also wrote poems, articles about art, an autobiography, and the first surrealist novel. Even more mysterious than the paintings, is the man himself: secretive, self-centered and contradictory, supercritical, ironic, and humorless, yet creative in ways he probably hardly understood. He did not share the Surrealists' overt preoccupation with the erotic, but was obsessed with memories of ancient mythology, 19th century German philosophy, metaphysics, and the secrets of creativity. With these obsessions, he tried, unconsciously, to solve the problems of his own sexuality which he concealed within. A loner, who never formally aligned himself with the Surrealists, or any other artistic movement, he produced several thousand works of art, with many changes of style. These were praised by Guillaume Apollinaire, Andre Breton, Max Ernst, and paul Eluard. He has remained one of the most baffling and memorable of those associated with the Surrealists.

"The unexpected encounter of a rubber glove, a green ball, and the head from the classical statue gives rise to one of the most compelling paintings in the history of modernist art: Giorgio de Chirico's Song of Love (1914). This uncanny image exemplifies what de Chirico called 'metaphysical' painting, which creates a disturbing sense of unreality, outside the usual logics of space and time, through the novel depiction of ordinary things. Emily Braun's essay explores the work's enigmatic motifs, showing how their roots range from the ancient culture of the Mediterranean, through the commercial scenarios de Chirico observed in the streets of Paris in the years around World War I, to the work of the avant-garde painters and poets of the time. The Song of Love continues to captivate viewers as de Chirico intended, even a century after it was made." - Back cover.