Giorgio de Chirico, "The Anxious Journey" Video Lecture - Humanities/Arts

(music)
- [Anna Umland] I'm here in storage with
Giorgio deChirico's 1913 painting,
The Anxious Journey.
1913 was a breakthrough
year for Giorgio deChirico.
This work is probably
one that was included
in a exhibition that
deChirico staged for himself
in his studio in Paris,
and among the people
who came to see that
show was the great poet
and critic and champion
of Avent Garde art,
Guillaume Apollinaire.
In October of 1913,
Apollinaire wrote about
his experience of deChirico's paintings,
and he remarked on these
painting's absolutely
modern quality and then on their
strangely metaphysical character.
deChirico makes you think
about how painting can be
not about a reality perceived, but about
a reality imagined.
What you're looking at is a
series of architectural arcades
arranged in a space that has ways,
that since the Renaissance
artists had used
to construct a plausible represenation
of a believable negotiatable space.
You have the orthogonals.
You have recessive characters,
but combined in a say that
really doesn't add up.
These colonnades lead
nowhere, or you don't
have the opportunity
to know where they lead
because the pallet is so somber
and shadows fill almost
very single one of them
other than this one
little sliver of blue sky
and brick wall, or that of course,
this looming, puffing locomotive,
which many people have
described as ominous
or threatening, akin to a caged beast,
and there definitely is something of that
psychological, emotional tension
by positioning this locomotive
behind this brick wall.
Following Apollinaire's
lead, a number of the
surrealist painters and
poets like Andre Breton,
or Rene Magritte seized
upon deChirico's work
as a key precursor for what
surrealist painting should be.
Arrested movement, convulsive beauty
of these strange dream
states, and I think that's
one of the things that The Anxious Journey
so beautifully exemplifies.
1913 remains as a year
where so many of his
signature motifs are first seen.