Metaphysical art
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Metaphysical art (Italian: Pittura metafisica) is the name of an Italian art movement, created by Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà. Their dream-like paintings of squares typical of idealized Italian cities, as well as apparently casual juxtapositions of objects, represented a visionary world which engaged most immediately with the unconscious mind, beyond physical reality, hence the name. Pittura Metafisica provided significant impetus for the development of Dada and Surrealism.
Carrà had been among the leading painters of Futurism. De Chirico had been working in Paris, admired by Apollinaire and avant-garde artists as a painter of mysterious urban scenes and still lifes.The two painters already knew of each other and formed an immediate alliance, further encouraged by the poetry of Alberto Savinio, de Chirico's younger brother. Aside from De Chirico and Carrà, other painters associated with metaphysical art include Savinio, Giorgio Morandi and Filippo De Pisis.
Metaphysical art sprang from the urge to explore the imagined inner life of familiar objects when represented out of their explanatory contexts: their solidity, their separateness in the space allotted to them, the secret dialogue that may take place between them. This alertness to the simplicity of ordinary things "which points to a higher, more hidden state of being" (Carrà) was linked to an awareness of such values in the great figures of early Italian painting, notably Giotto and Paolo Uccello about whom Carrà had written in 1915.
In this style of painting, an illogical reality seemed credible. Using a sort of alternative logic, Carrà and de Chirico juxtaposed various ordinary subjects—typically including starkly rendered buildings, classical statues, trains, and mannequins.
Their art, normally seen as purposeful naturalistic representation of figures, objects and actions in a controlled scenic space, could also seem mysteriously still and removed from the ordinary world; in the midst of war it offered a poetic language both inturned and strong and a corrective to the disruptive, fragmenting tendencies within Modernism. This desire to reattach his art to the great Italian past was stronger in Carrà, whose paintings of the time are also more economical and focused than de Chirico's; the latter continued to explore the enigmatic nature of the daily world in a more wide ranging manner.
"Mystery" is the most familiar word of de Chirico. He wrote the following: "there is much more mystery in the shadow of a man walking on a sunny day, than in all religions of the world".
Other painters were affected by their example and ideas, most notably Morandi. Carrà and de Chirico were together for only a few months in the spring and summer of 1917; by 1919 both artists had turned toward an art reflecting their study of the old masters. The movement, as such, may be said to have dissolved by 1920 but its reverberations were felt for a long time, contributing both to the more poetic aspects of Surrealism and to the revival of classicism in the painting of Mario Sironi and others in the 1920s.
