In Paris from 1911 until the outbreak of the First World War Giorgio de Chirico developed his ‘metaphysical painting’. Those artworks are very enigmatic, self-consciously enigmatic. There is lots of inspiration and influence from mythology, philosophy, Freudian psychoanalysis and probably his own experience. De Chirico was born in Greece in 1888 from Italian parents. He was born in the city of Volos, an ancient mythological city, the city where the expedition and the adventure of Jason and the Argonauts search for the Golden Fleece began. De Chirico identified himself with the gallant heroes of old Greece, and especially with Odysseus; I assume for his symbolic meaning: imagination and allegory.
Most of De Chirico's paintings from 1911 until 1917 are very sad, I would say. There is almost a feeling of no familiarity, a feeling of something inexplicably unpleasant, and a feeling of mysterious melancholy. Without any doubt they are great in a strange way. There is lots of feeling of the ancient past, lots of meeting between words, objects, architecture, history, and the sound of silence, the weirdness of the perspective, persons, the imagination, and fantasy. It is a perfect, beautiful match between a poet and an artist.
There is one painting I absolutely adore. I didn’t see it in the flesh unfortunately. Maybe if I had, my perception of it would be different. It is ‘The Disquieting Muses’ from 1916.
The Disquieting Muses - oil on canvas, 1916
In the background appears the Castello Estense or the Castle of Saint Michele of Ferrara. Ferrara was considered by De Chirico as a metaphysical city. In the centre of the painting are two tailors’ dummies, waiting for something unexpected, for someone to rescue them from the nostalgia, thinking about a glorious past, talking to their own unconscious. Who knows? Moreover the answer isn’t important at all, what is important is the melancholically beautiful poetry of De Chirico's imagination.
Surrealism was very concerned with this essential quest “The wish for absolute freedom”. In particular the early fathers of surrealism wanted to set people free. They were as serious and dogmatic as the Catholic Church in its most rigid period (most of the time I would say). The natural clan leader was André Breton. He borrowed the word ‘sur-reality’ from Apollinaire. That was in 1917 after he had watched the ballet “Parade”. I read somewhere (probably in one of Robert Hughes books, he is the only art critic that I read, I like his style, although I don’t always share his feelings) that Andre Breton behaved like a demanding and touchy Pope. The group around Breton had dogmas, rituals, catechism, saints and excommunications. N.B., how can you propagate “the Idea of absolute freedom”and at the some time act like a tyrant? A very obvious contradiction. Maybe ‘Absolute freedom’ is only possible if you don’t have your own will and your own thoughts. You surround yourself in all aspects of your being, both physically and psychically with something, someone….you free yourself from feelings and thoughts….and act like a collective. (I just thought of Star Trek the next generation and the Borg Collective.)
Back to the early years of Surrealism and the Surrealists, to the period that they didn't call themselves surrealists. Giorgio De Chirico is seen as the most original and by some the best surreal painter of all time. That sounds odd if you consider the fact that De Chirico represented the early surreal trend and only for a very short period, between 1911 and 1917. After that time, in the eyes of the surrealists, he had so betrayed his talent as to have become an UNPERSON. His work and his style changed more than anyone could have imagined, from the essence of disquieting poetry to candid, mock-classical art. He also faked his own early work, starting soon after 1920, and kept doing so to the absolute confusion of art dealers and collectors. I agree that this is an obscure kind of behaviour, and an obscene betrayal of the psychic integrity of his paintings from 1911-1917.
During his stay in Paris from 1911 till 1917 and during his ‘romance’ with the surreal art scene he created absolutely fabulously enigmatic surreal paintings. De Chirico has been influenced by Freud's ideas, by the art of Arnold Bӧcklin (I will blog about him very soon) and Max Klinger and by the philosophy of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. In his own words from the Paris period he concluded:
“To become truly immortal a work of art must escape all human limits: logic and common sense will only interfere. But once these barriers are broken it will enter the regions of childhood vision and dream. It is most important that we should rid art of all that it has contained of recognizable material to date, all familiar subject matter, all traditional ideas, all popular symbols must be banished forthwith”.
A Melancholy of the Beautiful Day - 1913
Being true to his own feelings and his beliefs he shaped his ‘Nostalgias’ and ‘Melancholies’ in a real unreal, theatrical landscape (mostly from Turin) with his dummies/mannequins lost (immersed) in their enigmatic existences and their surreal unconsciousness.
The Red Tower - 1913
I haven’t see a lot of De Chirico's paintings, the original ones. I think most of them have been bought by private collectors. There are a few in MOMA in New York, some of them really poetical. Three in the Tate Modern in London, a few in German Museums (I am sure some in Stuttgart), two in Belgium in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels. In the Guggenheim Museum in Venice are The Red Tower and The Nostalgia of the Poet. Those are the paintings that I have seen. I discovered also a few paintings in different cities in US. But I didn’t see them. I love the one in Guggenheim in Venice The Red Tower
Maybe I should not post to this blog my own work, and I should not write about it either.
But in this case I can’t resist it. I think this painting has something fantastic, something enigmatic and mysterious.
After a few years spent reading and watching and doing research about fantastic and fantasy art and all the genres in between I am coming more and more to understand and recognise all the boundaries and confusions between and about fantasy art and the fantastic elements in art. In his famous book "Au coeur du fantastique" Roger Caillos said that fantasy is secret and mysterious . I am not sure he was right about that. There are lots of paintings in the fantasy art genre which are full of fantastic elements and full of weird and crazy imaginary creatures with absolutely no mysterious or secret ambience what so ever. It could be just the problem of the onomastics or the semantic. I don’t know since I can’t ask Caillos any more precisely what he meant when he used mystery and secret as synonyms for fantasy.
Back to my painting “The Blueberry Fantasy”; which I categorised as a mysterious painting and I am not only the one. All the people who have seen it found The Blueberry Fantasy a very surrealistic and secret work. Every time someone looks at it they find new mysterious creatures, shapes and shadows. And people love it. As proud as I am (read it as sarcasm) I present my mysterious paintings amongst all the other great works by famous painters.
Voila!
I wrote this text a year ago and had forgotten to post it. Postpone today!
A few weeks ago I visited Toruń, a very old and historic city in Poland. The city is famous for having preserved almost intact its medieval spatial layout and many Gothic buildings, all built from brick, including monumental churches, the Town Hall and many burgher houses. I went there to see an exhibition of my ex-mother in law, a famous Polish film Movie star, the late Helena Grossówna. When lying in bed at the hotel during the night, I was thinking about all the famous people who were born and worked in this city. Nicolaus Copernicus was born in Toruń on 19 February 1473. At that time Toruń was part of Royal Prussia, a region of the Kingdom of Poland. Helenka Grossówna was born in Toruń too, in 1904. In her time Toruń wasn’t Polish anymore, the city was part of the German Empire. After the Second World War Toruń returned to Poland. I started to think about famous painters born in Toruń. At first I couldn’t remember any, and then suddenly Eureka! Jacek Yerka of course. He was born and studied in Toruń and he is one of the most famous fantastic artists of his time all over the world. The perfect subject for my surreal-fantasy art blog.
Jacek Yerka was born in Torun in 1952 studied art at the University in Toruń. It was a time (and probably still is) when technique was less important, and no one studied the old Masters. But Yerka did, he learnt directly from the masters of Northern Europe - the Van Eycks, Dierck Bouts, Robert Campin, Bosch, and surrealists such as Magritte.
Yerka said:
I did the first painting in my life a year before going to college, where I began studying graphics. My instructors always tried to get me to paint in the more contemporary abstract style, and move away from my fascination with realism. I saw this as an attempt to stifle my own creative style and steadfastly refused to fall in line. Eventually, my teachers relented.
His paintings are acrylic on canvas, pastels and drawings on paper.
His works are neo-surreal, fairy tale like, fantastic and sometimes more Sci-Fi than fantastic. The colours are now and then very brutal and powerful and occasionally very delicate, but nevertheless very expressive. The details are amazingly excellent. You really sense the hand of a Master, (F.E.: Between Heaven and Hell, The Way). As a painter I can tell you how time consuming it is to make these kinds of paintings.
I don’t like every work of his, but I definitely respect his imagination and his technique. I even think of buying one of his paintings of his grandmother’s kitchen. I hope he will make a few new paintings with this motif. Especially I like “Between Heaven and Hell”, "Cupboard Sunset", "Indian Summer", "the Strawberry Grove" and the "Illegal Production of Light".
Yerka's work has been exhibited in Poland, Germany, Monaco, France, and the United States. His works are also to be seen in Polish art museums. Yerka's work can also be seen in Mind Fields, a book in which Harlan Ellison has provided narration for each of Yerka's selected pieces.
In 1995 the artist was awarded the prestigious World Fantasy Award for the best artist.
Today riptapparel.comis featuring a surrealist photo illustration tee called "imaginarium". The artist that created the shirt is known for his dreamy collage-type illustrations. His name is Alex Bazinet, although he goes by the name Inner Monster and riptapparel has featured him on their site before.They only sell a shirt for 24 hours and at this moment only 7 hours left.
Here is the image of the T-shirt and the link to RIPTapparel page with the image://riptapparel.com/images/imaginarium.jpg
“The Mockery of Human Follies” is one of those mysterious paintings that don’t allow me to stop thinking about them. In the first place because it is an excellent art work (in my humble opinion) and in the second place (maybe it should be the first place) because it is a satirical-moralistic-fantastic painting in the Medieval tradition. And I am addicted to medieval art.
My first impression of the painting is that it is a realistic-satirical work a’la Breugel. I see a scene of the life of peasants in a village, with a wonderful renaissance landscape in the background. But then I discover all the unusual things. The faces of the pictured people are odd, some of the ugly, some of them not, but almost everyone is smiling. And the smile isn’t an innocent, nice smile; it is definitely a rascally-devilish smile. There are lots of strange scenes, unexpected moments, shows and associations in this painting. I see lots of resemblance with Erasmus famous book “Lof der Zotheid” (In Praise of Folly, in English). Erasmus used words to describe the folly of humans; the painter of “The mockery of humans follies” used the language of the colours of his paints.
The Dorotheum in Vienna attributed the painting to Frans Verbeeck. He belonged together with Hieronymus Bosch, Peter Breugel and Adriaen Brouwer to the group of the XVI century Flemish painters who painted satirical-moralising work. The fantasy and satire go hand in hand in lots of pictures, drawings, carvings, decorations, sculptures, miniatures, illuminated manuscripts in the art work of the medieval time. The Flemish painters did not have to invent all the monstrous creatures by themselves. They could fall back on a rich and broad collection of peculiar species, exotic monsters and extremely weird people from the medieval artists. What they probably did was add some new symbols, pictures of farmers and poor people, and of course lots of hidden eroticism behind the realistic scenes.
Frans Verbeeck is mentioned in the book written by Carel van Mander about important Netherlands and German painters. The book was written probably in the XVI century. Carel van Mander died in 1606. The first edition is from 1764. Frans Verbeeck was born and worked in Mechelen in Belgium. He died in 1570, but we don’t know his date of birth. His paintings can be admired in the Centre for Old Art 't Vliegend Peert in Mechelen in Belgium.
The painting, “The Mockery of Human Follies” was for sale in 2007 at an auction by Dorotheum in Vienna. The guide price was between €65.000 and €75.000. It was sold of course. I would love to have the painting on my own wall, look at it every day, discover new stories, hidden metaphors, hidden symbols. I'm still trying to work out the significance of the tiny people present in such numbers. Are they us? And are the huge people the gods playing with us? laughing at us? or it is just us, the human species playing with other humans? Please let me know if you have any more information about this painting. My curiosity requires answers!
