Books by Giorgio De Chirico
Modern Art Despite Modernism
by Henri Matisse, Gerhard Richter, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Robert Storr, Ben Shahn, Salvador Dali, Georgia O'Keeffe, Glenn Lowry, Balthus, Giorgio De Chirico, Max Beckmann, Francesco Clemente, George Grosz, Glenn D. Lowry
Throughout the twentieth century, the evolution of mainstream Modernism in the arts has been shadowed and made complex by alternative expressions of a seemingly retrograde type, art that appears to set back the clock or to redirect the stream of progress. Modern Art Despite Modernism explores the anti-Modernist impulse in painting and sculpture through socio-cultural conflicts of the 1920s, 30s and 40s. Texts by Robert Storr advocate the strengths of this impulse in paintings and drawings by Otto Dix, Lucian Freud, Francesco Clemente and even Pablo Picasso--and note the enduring popularity of such artists as Pavel Tchelitchew, whose "Hide and Seek," along with Andrew Wyeth's "Christina's World," remain among the public's favorite pictures. Storr also discusses taste and its implications, both part and present, for institutions like The Museum of Modern Art. This book was published as the second in a series of three titles, in conjunction with the millennial exhibitions schedule of MoMA2000 at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
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Geometry of Shadows
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.
De Chirico's poems are as essential and as mysterious as his paintings.
--Jhumpa Lahiri
A multifaceted artist who lived in multiple languages, de Chirico was just becoming famous in France for the paintings that inspired surrealism when he returned to Italy in 1916 to enlist for the First World War. Quickly determined unfit for the front line, de Chirico was assigned to desk duty and began to write poems in his native language. Translating his iconic visual imagination into literary form, Geometry of Shadows is a gorgeous document celebrating the elasticity and innate potential of language, by an artist ever in pursuit of deeper understanding.
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Hebdomeros with Monseiur Dudron's Adventure and Other Metaphysical Writings
One of the most revered and acclaimed products of Surrealism, de Chirico's sole novel provides a uniquely literary analogue to his painterly scenarios
The artist Giorgio de Chirico's novel, Hebdomeros is a dream-like book of situations and landscapes reminiscent of his paintings. In his introduction John Ashbery calls the book “the finest work of Surrealist fiction,” noting that de Chirico “invented for the occasion a new style and a new kind of novel ... his long run-on sentences, stitched together with semi-colons, allow a cinematic freedom of narration ... his language, like his painting, is invisible: a transparent but dense medium containing objects that are more real than reality.” Hebdomeros is accompanied by an appendix of previously untranslated or uncollected writings, including M. Dudron's Adventure, a second, fragmentary novel translated by John Ashbery.
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Hebdomeros A Novel
This seminal 1929 surrealist novel by the painter Giorgio de Chirico merges the realms of dream and reality.
In the artist’s only novel, de Chirico invites the reader into a world where language, time, space, and meaning are fluid, highlighting themes of mystery, myth, and the uncanny. Following the titular character Hebdomeros as he embarks on a series of philosophical musings and bizarre experiences divorced from a specific place or time, Hebdomeros embraces ambiguity in a profound exploration of the subconscious mind. Highly visual passages evoke the landscapes and compositions of de Chirico’s metaphysical paintings, and non sequiturs mirror the freedom that Surrealism allowed for in art of all categories.
An introduction by the scholar Fabio Benzi contextualizes de Chirico’s work within a broader modernist framework, highlighting its influence on surrealism and its resonance with the literary and artistic movements of the early twentieth century.
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Mr. Dudron
The painter's unpublished novel, an account of the misadventures of his autobiographical hero--a painter who wanders, dreams, remembers, frets, polemicizes, and tells stories. Translated from the Italian for the first time into English.
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