A major exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi tells the story of Giorgio de Chirico’s extraordinary artistic career and the dual impact that his painting had on modern art and on painters such as Carrà and Morandi, or Max Ernst, Magritte and Balthus.
100 works from exclusive private collections and from some of the most important museums in the world allow the visitor to explore the “Copernican revolution” that De Chirico brought to 20th century art, paving the way for all of the movements that provided the most interesting and lively developments in European art between the two world wars, from Dadaism to Surrealism and from Magical Realism to Neo-romanticism, dealing a clean and final blow to the now fully explored avenues of Cubism and the formal Avant-garde.
The choice of Florence as the venue for the exhibition is especially significant because it was here, while visiting the city in October 1909, that the 21-year-old De Chirico had the intuition that was to prompt him to create his first metaphysical works.
The exhibition includes some of De Chirico’s most famous works from 1911 on, paintings by Carrà and Morandi, and masterpieces by René Magritte, Max Ernst and Balthus, which the visitor can compare and contrast with several important works by such artists as Niklaus
Stoecklin, Arturo Nathan, Pierre Roy and Alberto Savinio, all of whom travelled the path first marked out by De Chirico.
A journey in pictures into unknown territory, “a look into the invisible” allows us to explore in depth the art of De Chirico and the 20th century.