SOUTHEASTERN COLLEGE

ART CONFERENCE REVIEW

V O L U M E X V, N U M B E R 1 , 2 0 0 6
 Between Böcklin and Picasso:
Giorgio de Chirico in Paris, 1909-1913
Roger Rothman

Figure 1. Giorgio de Chirico, The Enigma of the Oracle, summer Figure 2. Giorgio de Chirico, The Enigma of an Autumn
or autumn 1909, oil on canvas, 42 x 61 cm. Private Collection. Afternoon, autumn or winter 1909, oil on canvas, 45 x 60 cm.
© Leonardo Arte, Italy / 2007 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New Private Collection. © Leonardo Arte, Italy / 2007 Artists Rights
York / SIAE, Rome. Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome.

1. M. de Chirico has on exhibit in his studio (115, rue

Notre-Dame-des-Champs) some thirty canvases

G
whose inner art is consistently interesting. The art
iorgio de Chirico met Guillaume Apollinaire in
of this young painter is an inner, cerebral art which
1912, some time around the first appearance of
has no connection with that of the painters who
the painter’s work at the Salon d’Automne.1 Al-
have been discovered during the last few years. It
though evidence suggests that Apollinaire knew of de
does not stem from Matisse or from Picasso; it
Chirico by the time of the exhibition and admired his work,
does not come from the Impressionists. This origi-
he made no mention of the three paintings on display (The
nality is new enough to warrant our attention.
Enigma of the Oracle, 1909 (Figure 1); The Enigma of an
Ordinarily the acute and very modern sensations of
Autumn Afternoon, 1909 (Figure 2); Self-portrait, 1911)
M. de Chirico assume an architectural form. One
in any of his accounts of the exhibition.2 Nor did he men-
encounters railroad stations adorned with clocks;
tion de Chirico in his various reviews of the Salon des
towers, statues, and large, deserted public squares.
Indépendants in March of 1913, where the painter
Railroad trains pass by on the horizon. Here are
showed three works, The Melancholy of Departure3; The
some of the peculiar titles chosen for these strange-
Enigma of the Hour, 1910-11; The Enigma of the Arrival
ly metaphysical paintings: The Enigma of the
and the Afternoon, 1911-12. Instead, Apollinaire was
Oracle, The Sadness of Departure, The Enigma of
concerned almost exclusively with the various displays of
the Hour, Solitude, and The Whistling of the
abstract (orphic as Apollinaire dubbed them) works by
Locomotive.5
Francis Picabia, Fernand Léger and especially Roger
Delaunay.4 It was not until October 1913, a full year after
As Willard Bohn has noted, Apollinaire’s assessment of
the two had met, that the poet made any mention of de
de Chirico’s work involves the poet’s characteristic interests
Chirico’s work. But when he did, it was more than just a
at the moment, interests transposed from his previous en-
passing note:
dorsement of the “pure paintings” of Picabia, Léger and
Delaunay, interests reflected in the words “originality,”
“new,” and “modern.”6 And in almost every subsequent
assessment, the terms would remain the same. Over the
course of the next five years, de Chirico was mentioned
more than a dozen times by Apollinaire and, in almost
every case, the terms were the same: “originality,” “new,”
“modern.”7
But such terms can be misleading, for what, exactly, is
“original” in de Chirico’s art? In what way is it “new”
and “modern”? Surely it is not new and modern in the
sense that one would apply these terms to Delaunay’s
work—work in which the departure from traditional con-
ventions of modeling, color, spatial construction, not to
mention iconography, is most emphatic. It is impossible to
imagine that Apollinaire was blind to the absence of such
devices in de Chirico’s work—the way in which de Chirico’s
construction of an irregular, awkward, but still inhabita-
ble space recalls that of quattrocento painting, the return
to the use of local color and traditional methods of model-
ing the figure. Even the favored images—the arcades, towers,
and trains—while certainly unique at the time, nonetheless
looked back on the machines and architectural structures
of the recent past, unmistakably before the appearance of
automobiles and buildings of steel and glass.
If one is unwilling to accuse Apollinaire of bad faith,
then I think one has to conclude that what so fascinated
the poet was the way in which de Chirico’s novelty was
in part the result of a certain resistance to novelty, an
insistence upon the attempt to hold onto the past, even
as it recedes into the distance—a distance made palpable
in a work like The Lassitude of the Infinite, 1912 (also
on view at 115, rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs), where a
white tower and black train appear faintly at the far end
of an impossibly deep courtyard, one that seems, despite
the indications of the surrounding architecture, to reach
back for miles. Perhaps, then, what led the poet to call
these works “new,” “modern,” and “original,” was the
peculiar way in which they set out to engage, in the moment
of present, all that was old, not-modern, unoriginal.
2.
I
n February of 1914, Apollinaire published “Le Musicien
de Saint-Merry.” In place of the staccato of the tele-
graph and the speed of the automobile that had been
the hallmark of his previous poetry, “Le Musicien de
Saint-Merry” draws the reader back into the melodic sound
of Orpheus’s flute and the slow procession of the funeral
march. The poem opens with the remarks of the narrator
who speaks in first person of “the joy of wandering and
the pleasure of the wanderer’s death.”8 It is against this
backdrop of dispersal and loss that the reader is thrust
6 SECAC Review Vol.XV No. 1
into a precise and singular moment in the present: “May
21, 1913.” On this day, in the presence of the “ferryman
of the dead,” and an accompanying swarm of flies, came
“the man with no eyes or nose or ears.”9 He was playing
the flute and was followed, as he marched through the
streets of Paris, by a long procession of women dressed in
black, stretching out “as long as a day without bread.”
At the end of this long, slow march, he stopped in front
of a deserted sixteenth-century house with broken windows;
he stepped inside and was followed by the procession of
women, all of whom “entered without a backward glance/
Without regretting what they had left/ Or abandoned/
Without regretting the day their life or their memory.”10
The narrator who had been listening to the musician’s song
and watching the women, entered the house as well, but
found it empty. In the end, as night fell, he found himself
alone with his memories—memories that he, unlike the
women, was unable to let go of: “Oh night/ You my sor-
row and my futile waiting/ I hear the dying sound of a
distant flute.”11
It is clearly an autobiographical poem, not only in the
sense that it narrates or transposes events in Apollinaire’s
life at the time,12 but more substantially, as Phillipe Renaud
has pointed out, in the way in which the figure of the
musician, the poet of musicality that previously stood at
the center of the poetics of Alcools, is now represented in
third person, the object of the poet’s gaze from outside.13
The flute player is therefore the figure of the poet him-
self—as he was in the past. All he can hear now are the
dying sounds of an older poetic aesthetic, one abandoned
for the new, non-melodic sounds—the chatter, screeches
and rumbles—of the modern city. He is a figure that
Apollinaire has abandoned, or wishes to abandon, but
one from whom he separates himself with a significant
regret. He is a figure that, unlike the women who follow
him, the poet is unable to let go of without a long back-
ward glance. In a sense then, “Le Musicien de Saint-Merry”
is a poem that thematizes the transformation from the late
symbolist aesthetic of “Zone” to the avant-gardist aesthet-
ic of “Les Fenêtres” and “Lundi Rue Christine.” That it is
represented in terms of sadness and longing suggests that
it was a transformation about which the poet was, at the
very least, ambivalent.
“Le Musicien de Saint-Merry” is not the only poem
of the sixteen collected in “Ondes,” the first section of
Calligrammes, to draw attention to this underside of the
modern spectacle announced in “Zone” and celebrated in
“Lundi Rue Christine.” The first poem in the collection,
“Liens,” sets an ambivalent tone for the poems that fol-
low. For while it begins on a triumphant note (“sons de
cloches à travers l’Europe”), it ends more with an unmis-
takable expression of melancholy:
 J’écris seulement pour vous exalter
Ô sens ô sens chéris
Ennemis du souvenir
Ennemis du désir
Ennemis du regret
Ennemis des larmes
Ennemis de tout ce que j’aime encore
And this very same ambivalence appears again at the
end of the collection, with the poem “Il Pleut.” Like
Apollinaire’s more famous “visual poems,” “Lettre-Océan”
and “La Cravate et la Montre,” both of which appear in
this collection, “Il Pleut” joins image and text by present-
ing the five lines of the poem in a roughly vertical dimen-
sion, so that the reader follows the text as if he were fol-
lowing raindrops as they fell to the ground, a soft wind
blowing the poem a bit to the right. Reading it, one finds
the dead voices of the past juxtaposed with the joys and
marvels of the present. (“il pleut des voies de femmes
comme si elles étaient mortes même dans le souvenir/c’est
vous aussi qu’il pleut merveilleuses rencontres de ma vie
ô gouttelettes”). It is a poem that, like “Liens,” serves to
inflect the rest of the poems (now those that preceded it)
with a melancholic sentiment, one that rubs against the
grain of works like “Lundi Rue Christine” and “Les
Fenêtres.” And this is to say, as Renaud points out: “The
entire first part of Calligrammes seems to be placed under
the composite sign of the rupture and persistence of cer-
tain links [to the past].”14 Add to this the fact that “Le
Musicien de Saint-Merry” is the eighth of the sixteen poems
in the collection, and therefore the center around which
the collection turns, and one is forced to consider the
aggressive modernity of Calligrammes within the context
of a decidedly more ambivalent sentiment.
All three poems—“Le Musicien de Saint-Merry,” “Lien”
and “Il Pleut”—derive their sentiment of nostalgia from
what could be called “melancholic modernism,” a mod-
ernism that accepts without affirmation the gap between
past and present, the loss of the past that functions as one
of the preconditions of modernity. As Apollinaire would
put it in “Crépuscule,” modernity is, at the very moment
it is affirmed in all its distinction from the past, “frôlée
par les ombres des morts,” grazed by the shadows of the
dead. The past is experienced as a ghost that hovers over
the now. It is neither present nor absent. Here we glimpse
one of the most significant relations between Apollinaire
and de Chirico, a relation that involves the strange resist-
ance of the past, of its uncanny hold over the present, a
relation that exhibits not an enthusiasm for all that is new
and vital, but rather a melancholy for all that is old and
dead—all that is lost to history, inaccessible to the present,
but which nevertheless refuses to leave.
SECAC Review Vol.XV No. 1
3.
W
hereas in 1905 Julius Meier-Graefe saw Böcklin’s
manipulations of Greek mythology as hopeless-
ly theatrical and inauthentic (when held along-
side the “objective” art of the impressionists),15 de Chirico
perceived in them a peculiar sort of authenticity, one in
which the theatrical, the artificial, spoke to the true condi-
tions of modernity:
When, after having left the Munich Academy, I
realized that the road I was following was not the
one I should follow and I entered upon tortuous
paths, some modern artists, especially Max Klinger
and Böcklin, captivated me. I thought of those pro-
foundly felt compositions, having a particular
mood [Stimmung] which one recognized among a
thousand others… I meditated a long time. Then I
began to have my first revelations. I drew less, I
even somewhat forgot how to draw, but every time
I did, it was under the drive of necessity. Then I
understood certain vague sensations which I had
previously been unable to explain. The language
that the things of this world sometimes speak; the
sensations of the year and the hours of the day. The
epochs of history too: prehistory, and the revolu-
tions in thought throughout the ages, modern
times—all appeared strange and distant.16
What Meier-Graefe read as inauthentic, anachronistic,
de Chirico read as thematizing the inauthentic, the anach-
ronistic, and what Meier-Graefe took to be method, de
Chirico took to be subject-matter. In this way, Böcklin’s
work came to appear not false but strange, not outdated
but distant. In a later essay, de Chirico amplified his earli-
er statement, clarifying his account of the painter’s work
as a depiction of the modern experience of temporal dislo-
cation and subjective confusion:
Every one of his works gives that sense of surprise
and unease that one feels when finding oneself con-
fronted with an unknown person, but one whom
one seems to have seen before, without being able
to remember the time or the place, or when one
enters a strange city for the first time, and finds a
square, a street, a house in which one seems to
have been already.17
That which Meier-Graefe took to be derivative, De
Chirico took to be uncanny—which is to say, the kind of
repetition that is productive, that brings with it a mean-
ing, a sense not carried by the first iteration.18 The sense
of having seen that before, of having already experienced
7
it in the past, was for de Chirico the explicit theme and
intentional subject-matter of Böcklin’s work. And if this
experience of the uncanny repetition demands that one, in
a sense, both remember and forget at the same time, then
one ought to find in de Chirico’s assessment a particular
attention paid to this peculiar dynamic of remembering-
and-forgetting. In fact it plays a central role in de Chirico’s
understanding, not only of the subjective conditions of
modern experience, but of the objective results as well:

It seems to me that surprise, that sense of disquiet-

ing astonishment which certain works of genius
provoke in us, is owed to an interruption, albeit
momentary, of life—or rather, of the logical
rhythm of the universe… Under the shock of such
a surprise, all our senses and cerebral faculties lose
track of human logic, of that logic to which we’ve
become accustomed since childhood, or to use
another word, they forget, they lose their memory,
all life comes to a stop, and in that suspension of
the living rhythm of the universe the figures we see
before us, without changing material form, offer
themselves to our gaze in the guise of ghosts.19

The ghost is that uncanny double of the living being, the ob-
ject brought back to life by the subjective experience of loss,
of the forgetting of that which must be remembered to live.
De Chirico first saw the paintings of Arnold Böcklin
some time in late 1906 or early 1907, while a student in
Munich. It took only a year and a half for this initial con-
frontation to make its way into his work. Triton and Siren Figure 3. Giorgio de Chirico, Prometheus, winter 1908-09, oil on
(1908-09), for example, derives from Böcklin’s Triton and canvas, 117 x 81 cm. Private Collection. © Leonardo Arte, Italy
Nereid from 1873-74, while both Prometheus (1908-09) / 2007 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome.
(Figure 3) and Sphinx (1908-09) derive from Böcklin’s
Prometheus from 1882. (Figure 4)20 In each case, de
Chirico has applied to Böcklin’s model an identical set of
actions, and done so with a consistency that suggests a delib-
erate attempt, not merely to adopt the original, but to
transform it, to make it say something, do something, that
it was not intended to say or do.
What one notices first of all is the way in which de
Chirico has drawn Böcklin’s figures to the foreground,
closer to the picture plane. In Böcklin’s version of Triton
and Nereid, the two figures sit atop a rock in the middle
of the ocean. The rock is set into the middle ground, while
the foreground is filled by a narrow strip of sea that serves
to distance the mythological scene from the viewer. In de
Chirico’s version, the two figures (with Nereid replaced by
Siren) swim in the open sea. The rock has been removed
and the space of the viewer is made continuous with that
of the two figures. Where Böcklin’s painting sets up a bar- Figure 4. Arnold Böcklin, Prometheus, 1882, Private Collection.
rier between us (the real) and them (the mythological), de © Leonardo Arte, Italy / 2007 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New
Chirico’s painting works, at least formally, to chip away York / SIAE, Rome.
at this barrier.

8 SECAC Review Vol.XV No. 1

 This attempt to collapse the distance between viewer
and viewed is more pronounced in his treatment of
Böcklin’s Prometheus. As in Triton and Nereid, Prometheus
holds the viewer at a distance from the main elements of
the scene: a wide strip of water separates us from the dis-
tant island, at the top of which Prometheus struggles. De
Chirico’s Sphinx, although related to Böcklin’s Prometheus
in its depiction of a mythological figure atop a mountain,
works to overcome Böcklin’s indicators of distance and
Figure 5. Giorgio de Chirico, Autumnal Meditation, winter 1911-12, oil on canvas,53 x 70 cm. François de Menil Collection, New
York. © Leonardo Arte, Italy / 2007 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome.
division between viewer and viewed, reality and myth.
Where the composition of Böcklin’s Prometheus serves to
translate the temporally delimited world of the present
from the timeless realm of myth by way of a spatial gap
between near and far, the composition of de Chirico’s
Sphinx seems designed to collapse this distinction between
reality and myth. Here the viewer has crossed the sea and
now stands firmly on the island’s shore. The sea is still
SECAC Review Vol.XV No. 1
present, now off to the side, a sign of the distance already
traversed. Looking up, we see the massive, flat-topped
mountain and are free to imagine a difficult, but not im-
possible, trek to the Sphinx at the top.
A similar effect is produced by de Chirico’s Prometheus.
Here the viewer is brought even closer to the mysterious
figure at the top of the mountain. Now standing some dis-
tance above the shore and on the mountain itself, the viewer
seems to have climbed halfway to the top. This visual device
suggests that with a little more effort, one could actually
reach the summit. De Chirico has left only a tiny sliver of
sea on the lower left of the painting: the dim recollection
of a distance crossed some time ago. Indeed, this island is
now inhabited, dotted with classical buildings imbedded so
deeply into the rock they look as if they were always there.
De Chirico’s subsequent paintings treat the space between
the figures and the viewer with the same sense of continuity.
9
The Battle of the Centaurs (1909) and Dying Centaur (1909)
depict these mythological scenes as if they belonged to the
same space as we do. Even where his borrowings are less
direct, the translation is the same. In Böcklin’s Look, The
Meadow Laughs! (1887), three musicians stand in the mid-
dle ground atop a shallow hill, while the viewer is located
beneath them on a dirt path. When adopted by de Chirico
in his Serenade (1909), the three musicians are now pulled
down to the foreground and address the viewer directly.
Here again, Böcklin’s insistence upon a gap between viewer
and viewed, between past and present, history and myth-
ology, is, in de Chirico’s compositions, drawn to a close.
But the most spectacular negation of distance comes in
the figure that de Chirico would call the “Oracle,” a fig-
ure that first appeared in a drawing by his brother Alberto
Savinio (1909), and that derives in part from the shrouded
figure in Böcklin’s most famous painting, The Isle of the
Dead (five versions painted between 1880-1886), and in
part from a similarly shrouded figure in Böcklin’s Ulysses
and Calypso (1882). In The Isle of the Dead, the figure
appears far in the distance, separated from the viewer by
a deep expanse of sea, while in Ulysses and Calypso, Ulysses
is placed on a rocky outcropping off the shore, while the
viewer stands on the sand. In addition, both figures are
painted in near monochrome, as silhouettes, thereby rein-
forcing the sense of distance and inaccessibility. By con-
trast, in de Chirico’s The Enigma of the Oracle (1909)
(Figure 1), the shrouded Ulysses now stands at the edge of
(and not at the other side of) a space continuous with that
of the viewer. Still painted in monochrome, and still near-
ly as insubstantial as a silhouette, the oracle nevertheless
is linked to our space, within our grasp. Like all of de
Chirico’s transformations of Böcklin’s work, this painting
manifests a consistent, programmatic attempt to do away
with the experience, central to the Swiss painter’s work,
of a distance and barrier between the historical and the
mythical. As a whole, these works appear as a kind of re-
cuperative effort, an attempt to build a bridge that would
establish a direct connection between viewer and viewed.
It was an effort that very shortly de Chirico would realize
had to be performed in a less direct, more dialectical fash-
ion, in a sense not unlike that of Baudelaire, for whom
beauty, debased under modernity, is redeemed in the torn
and dirty garments of the mourner.
4.
D
e Chirico’s subsequent paintings extend the painter’s
efforts to provide access to Böcklin’s mythological
figures, to bring the realm of myth into that of
history and the present. In a work like The Enigma of an
Autumn Afternoon (autumn-winter 1909) (Figure 2), for
example, the once-distant body of Ulysses has hardened to
10
stone, inert, but nonetheless material and present in the
form of a sculpture that stands within reach, both physical
and conceptual. The same process of materialization ap-
pears in Autumnal Meditation (1911-12) (Figure 5), where
the Ulysses monument stands between two identical Roman-
esque buildings that frame for the viewer a clear and direct
path across the empty square.
In the same year as Autumnal Meditation, de Chirico
fashioned out of plaster a small sculpture of the figure of
Ariadne. It was the only sculpture he would make before
1939, and he used it as the model and starting point for
a series of eight paintings executed between the spring of
1912 and the autumn of 1913. The model depicts Ariadne
reclining on her side, one arm wrapped around her head.
Abandoned by Theseus on the isle of Naxos, she waits in
vain for her love to return.21
The series of Ariadne paintings is crucial to our under-
standing of de Chirico’s subsequent work, particularly as it
concerns the formal aspects of the works. Scholarly atten-
tion to the iconography of Ariadne, as well as the attempt
to locate the source material used in creating these works—
while useful—has ended up marginalizing the importance
of the structure of these paintings. The following account
of the eight paintings in the Ariadne series aims, therefore,
to address the formal, structural aspects of these works.22
It is an approach warranted, if not compelled, by the
painter’s consistent iconography; clearly, in fixing upon the
same sculptural representation of the same mythological
figure, de Chirico was concerned with the ways in which
the viewer’s reception of the same subject matter would
be affected by changes in composition. Indeed, the great-
est impediment to our understanding of de Chirico’s work
stems from the persistent fixation on the objects painted
rather than the manner of painting them. As should be ex-
pected, de Chirico’s formal devices end up reflecting back
on the painter’s favorite objects and themes, thereby forc-
ing us to reconsider the iconographic implications of these
works as well. Although it is of course banal and obvious
to insist upon the interrelationship between form and con-
tent, the fact that this has remained almost entirely unex-
amined in the scholarship on de Chirico makes it necessary
to begin again at the beginning.
In The Lassitude of the Infinite (spring 1912) (Figure 6),
the first of the eight paintings in the series, Ariadne is set
out before the viewer in the foreground of an enormous
courtyard. She is bathed in an inviting sunlight and the
framing structures are set far from the monument, thereby
opening her to the viewer’s gaze. The most significant sign
of distance, of potential inaccessibility, is the near feature-
lessness of the figure. Hidden by the shadow of the arm
around her, her face is barely discernable and details such
as the hands, feet, and torso have been likewise elided.
The force of this painting derives, in large measure, from
the tension between the access granted by the figure’s dis-
SECAC Review Vol.XV No. 1
 Figure 6. Giorgio de Chirico,
The Lassitude of the Infinite,
spring 1912, oil on canvas,
44 x 112 cm. Private Collection.
© Leonardo Arte, Italy / 2007
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New
York / SIAE, Rome.

Figure 7. Giorgio de Chirico,

Solitude (Melancholy),
autumn 1912, oil on canvas,
79 x 63.5 cm. Eric and Salome
Estorick Foundation, London.
© Leonardo Arte, Italy / 2007
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New
York / SIAE, Rome.

SECAC Review Vol.XV No. 1 11

position in space and
the access denied by her
near featurelessness—
that is, in the apparent
proximity of the figure
and the contrasting signs
of unapproachability.
The following autumn
de Chirico returned to
the figure of Ariadne,
this time drawing not
from the model of his
own plaster cast, but
from the drawings of
Ariadne in Salomon
Reinach’s published line
drawings of classical fig-
ures.23 From Reinach’s
model, de Chirico made Figure 8. Giorgio de Chirico, The Soothsayer’s Recompense, summer
1913, oil on canvas,135.5 x 180.5 cm. The Philadelphia Museum of Art,
seven more paintings of Philadelphia. © Leonardo Arte, Italy / 2007 Artists Rights Society (ARS), Statue (summer or au-
Ariadne, all in the same New York / SIAE, Rome.
melancholic pose, wait-
ing in vain for Theseus to return. The first of these two,
Solitude (Melancholy) (Figure 7) includes the inscription
“melanchonia” on the base of the monument, thereby
making explicit the intended sentiment of loss and lamen-
tation. The second, The Melancholy of a Beautiful Day
(spring 1913), finds Ariadne pushed back into the dis-
tance, once again placed at a significant spatial remove.
By contrast, in the two subsequent works, The Joys and
Enigmas of a Strange Hour (spring 1913) and The Sooth-
sayer’s Recompense (summer 1913) (Figure 8), Ariadne is
brought closer to the foreground, her features more detailed. Chirico had brought her within arm’s reach, she was no
We can now make out her closed eyes and curly hair,
her nose, mouth, breasts and feet. Here it is not Ariadne’s
physical distance that prevents our full grasp, but the
context in which she is placed. The sudden appearance
of a train or a palm tree in an otherwise classical environ-
ment creates an illogical context that itself reflects back on
the sculpture of Ariadne. It is as if we are reading a
sentence in which the words are all drawn from different
languages—not a question of physical distance, but of
logical construction.
In the sixth and seventh paintings in the series, de Chirico
approaches his object from a different angle, the viewer
now looming over Ariadne as if to contain her beneath his become more proximate had also become more insubstan-
down-turned gaze. In Ariadne (summer or autumn 1913)
(Figure 9), the sculpture is yet again caught in the bright
sun, a white stone against a yellow courtyard. The build-
ing to her left casts a long, large shadow across the piaz-
za, while the only other brightly lit element is the tower in
the distance. Also white, the tower is enormous and out of
scale—optical cues that serve to draw Ariadne from the
foreground to the background, once again moving away
12
from the viewer’s grasp.
In Ariadne’s Afternoon
(also summer or autumn
1913), Ariadne slips be-
neath the bottom of the
canvas so that only the
upper half of her body
is visible. We are offered
but a fragment, a body
only partially accessible,
much like the half-hidden
train and ship in the
distance.
But perhaps the most
disquieting experience of
inaccessibility comes
from the eighth and fi-
nal painting in the Aria-
dne series, The Silent
tumn 1913) (Figure 10).
Unlike the earlier paint-
ings, here the body is pressed flat against the picture plane
and fills roughly half the painting. The colors have changed
as well: no longer a bright white stone in the middle of
largely grey surroundings, she is now just as dark and grey
as the wall behind her. Nearly monochrome, her body is
defined only by a collection of short hatch-marks and stiff,
irregular black lines. She appears flat, flimsy, and insub-
stantial. In this, the final painting of the series, Ariadne’s
body has lost almost all of its physicality, its availability
to exploration by touch. Ironically, at the very moment de
longer of the material one could hold in one’s hand.
In all eight of the paintings, de Chirico’s fixation on
the body of Ariadne manifests the same frustrated desire
that drove the painter’s earlier manipulations of Böcklin’s
work. The desire to bring the distant near, to overcome
the gulf between past and present, history and mythology,
remained constant between 1909 and 1913. What the
Ariadne series demonstrates is that what did change dur-
ing those four years was the manner in which de Chirico
conceived of this desire and its frustrations. What had
appeared (in Munich and later Milan) a problem of dis-
tance had become a problem of substance. What had
tial; in the end, she was just as inaccessible. What de
Chirico had come to realize was that his access to the
body of Ariadne had less to do with her position in space
than her internal composition.
SECAC Review Vol.XV No. 1
Figure 9. Giorgio de Chirico, Ariadne, summer or autumn, 1913, oil on canvas,135.6 x 180.5 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York. © Leonardo Arte, Italy / 2007 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome.
5.
T
hroughout his life, de Chirico worked hard to
obscure his most immediate influences, to the
point of suggesting that he had almost no interest
whatsoever in the modernist practices that surrounded
him. And in this he was aided by Apollinaire, for whom
de Chirico’s painting erupted as a revelation, a unique case
of an artist untouched by the contemporaneous practices
of French modernism. (“De Chirico,” wrote Apollinaire,
“may be the only living European painter who has not been
influenced by the new French school.”24) Although Apol-
linaire’s penchant for exaggeration, even outright misrep-
resentation,25 has been well known for some time now,
scholars have persisted in taking the poet at his word.26
The exception to this rule is William Rubin who, in an
essay from 1983, broke from the prevailing opinion of de
Chirico as the great outsider.27 Although Rubin’s analysis
suffers at times from a lack of discrimination—arguing
SECAC Review Vol.XV No. 1
for parallels between de Chirico and Duchamp, Rousseau,
Matisse, Picasso, Klee, among others—his essay makes it
clear that one cannot take either the artist or his most fa-
mous apologist at their word. Indeed, it is Rubin’s discus-
sion of de Chirico’s relation to cubism28 that would seem
most pressing when considering the technical and stylistic
transformation that took place as the painter worked
through his series of Ariadne paintings between the spring
of 1912 and the autumn of 1913.
The painter’s reception of cubism is obvious on the sur-
face of Ariadne herself, in the metamorphosis of her thick
and weighty body into a thin, flat form defined only by
rough hatch-marks.29 Even more representative of de Chirico’s
debt to cubism is the space in which Ariadne is disposed.
Beginning with the deep, wide courtyard in The Lassitude
of the Infinite, (spring 1912) (Figure 6), de Chirico pro-
gressively draws the buildings around her ever closer.
Already by the autumn of 1912, in Solitude (Melancholy))
(Figure 7), Ariadne’s surroundings have grown more inti-
13
mate, her body more tightly contained by the arcaded
buildings around her. Behind her, the distant horizon
appears only to the left, behind the large and dark build-
ing that serves to hold the statue near to the viewer. The
most dramatic spatial transformation, and the one that
gives the most unequivocal indication of de Chirico’s debt to
cubism, comes with two paintings from the fall of 1913:
Ariadne (Figure 9), and Ariadne’s Afternoon. As in Picasso
and Braque’s landscapes from 1907 until 1909, the picture
plane tilts upward most rapidly, and the body of Ariadne,
now viewed at a sharp angle from above, appears as if she
might in fact be standing rather than lying down. Of all
his spatial constructions, this one bears comparison with
that of early cubism where, as Leo Steinberg has shown,
the attempt to manage the ambivalently disposed female
body was one
of Picasso’s central concerns.30 Although de Chirico made
only scant reference to cubism and did his best to hide the
sort of influences apparent in the evolution of the Ariadne
series, he did leave some indication of his awareness, in-
deed real understanding, of the rudiments of cubist paint-
ing—most notably in his assessment of Cézanne. Consistent
with the contemporaneous reading of Cézanne, de Chirico
presents him as one of the key figures in the break with
the aesthetics of impressionism. In addition—and in a way
that parallels the reading provided by Apollinaire in par-
ticular—de Chirico considers Cézanne’s achievement in
terms of capturing a vision into the world that hides be-
neath the world of our senses, an alternate reality, not un-
like the “conceived” reality that Apollinaire saw in cubism.31
In one of his early manuscripts, de Chirico uses Cézanne’s
work as a means of distinguishing those he calls “sensa-
tionalists” from those he considers “impressionists.” Where,
for de Chirico, impressionists are concerned only with the
simple task of copying that which appears before the artist’s
eyes, sensationalists have in mind a more profound task:
They see something: a landscape, a figure, a still
life; then using a certain technique to imitate what
they see, they try to give to whoever looks at their
painting a sensation which what they have repro-
duced could not give if it were seen in nature. Thus
M. Cézanne, in painting a still life—a napkin with
big squares, and some tomatoes or fruits—suc-
ceeds in giving us a sensation which could not be
given by all the still lives of the museums in which
the fruits and vegetables are much truer—in the
meaning generally given to truth, of course.32
In sum, what de Chirico managed to do in his first years
in Paris was to find a way to bring the various pictorial
transformations into consonance with his earlier concern
with the problem of distance and absence. It was his early
embrace of Böcklin that enabled de Chirico to receive cubist
14
fragmentation, despecification, and dislocation of the body
as a further development of the same symbolist-derived
aesthetic of loss. As Rosalind Krauss has demonstrated,
the various innovations of cubist painting came, in fact,
at considerable expense—most notably, that of the loss
of corporeality. For the flat, fragmented forms in Picasso’s
cubist work evinced a peculiar “withdrawal of touch from
the field of the visual,” which was in turn “experienced…
as a passionate relation to loss.”33 And it was this experi-
ence of loss that contributed to one of the crucial turns
in the painter’s work; that is, from the morphological to
the semiological—a turn which in a certain sense enabled
Picasso to regain in some fashion that which he had
watched slip through his fingers.34
In its thematization of the experience of lost carnality,
the Ariadne paintings suggest that de Chirico’s early expe-
rience with Böcklin’s melancholic figuration of a distant
mythological sphere enabled the painter to receive the
cubist experience of loss with a considerable sensitivity.
Whether he was willing to express it or not, de Chirico
had found in cubism a means of translating the nineteenth-
century discourse of loss—of the body as distant, even
irretrievable—into an avant-gardist discourse, one in
which the body is not so much distant as incorporeal.
Bucknell University
1. Although the date of their first meeting cannot be verified with
certainty, 1912 is the most plausible date, as proposed by Willard Bohn,
Apollinaire and the Faceless Man (Cranbury: Associated University
Presses, 1991), 96. For details of their early interactions, see Willard
Bohn, “Giorgio de Chirico’s ‘Portrait of Guillaume Apollinaire’ of
1914,” The Burlington Magazine 147 (November 2005): 751-754; and
Paolo Baldacci, De Chirico: The Metaphysical Period, 1888-1919, trans.
Jeffrey Jennings (New York: Bulfinch Press, 1997), 157-166.
2. All dates attributed to de Chirico’s work are taken from those
given in Baldacci, De Chirico.
3. This work has not been identified. The title does not refer to any
of de Chirico’s paintings of this period. See Baldacci, De Chirico, 430.
4. Apollinaire referred to The Cardiff Team as “the most modern
painting in the Salon…Light is here revealed in all its truth.” Apollinaire,
“Through the Salon des Indépendants,” in Guillaume Apollinaire,
Apollinaire on Art, trans. Susan Suleiman (New York: Da Capo, 1972),
291. Apollinaire’s text originally appeared in Montjoie! (March 18,
1913).
5. This article by Apollinaire was discovered only recently. See Bohn,
Apollinaire and the Faceless Man, 97. Apollinaire’s subsequent mention
of de Chirico came on the occasion of the 1913 Salon d’Automne, which
opened on November 15. This was the same exhibition in which Picabia
presented his early abstractions, Udnie and Edtaonisl. Regarding de
Chirico’s presentation of four works (a portrait, a study of a nude and
two metaphysical paintings, The Melancholy of a Beautiful Day and The
Red Tower), Apollinaire wrote in L’Intransigeant, November 16, 1913:
“M. de Chirico, an awkward and very gifted painter, is showing some
curious landscapes full of new intentions, powerful architecture, and
great sensitivity.” (Apollinaire, Apollinaire on Art, 327)
6. See Bohn, Apollinaire and the Faceless Man, 97.
7. In 1918, Apollinaire famously declared that de Chirico “may be
the only living European painter who has not been influenced by the
SECAC Review Vol.XV No. 1
new French school.” (Apollinaire, Apollinaire on Art, 461). One can
hardly be more original than that.
8. This, the second stanza, reads in full: “Je ne chante pas ce monde
ni les autres astres / Je chante toutes le possibilités de moi-même hors de
ce monde et des astres / Je chante la joie d’errer et le plaisir d’en
mourir.” The translation of “Le Musicien de Saint-Merry” is taken from
Guillaume Apollinaire, Calligrammes, trans., Anne Hyde Greet
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 70-77.
9. In full: “Le 21 du mois de mai 1913 / Passeur des morts et les
mordonnantes mériennes / Des millions de mouches éventaient une
splendeur / Quand un homme sans yeux sans nez et sans oreilles /
Quittant le Sébasto entra dans la rue Aubry-le-Boucher /…”
10. In full: “Et toutes y entrèrent sans regarder derrière elles / Sans
regretter ce qu’elles ont laissé / Ce qu’elles ont abandonné / Sans regret-
ter le jour la vie et la mémoire /”
11. “O nuit / Toi ma douleur et mon attente vaine / J’entends mourir
le son d’une flûte lointaine/”
12. Bohn sees the “occasional touches of melancholy,… traces of
which are scattered throughout the poem” as “motivated by the recent
demise” of his relation with Marie Laurencin (Bohn, Apollinaire and the
Faceless Man, 29). Baldacci concludes that the poem’s great achievement
stems from the way it uses personal history to “transcend the confines of
the lyric fragment.” (Baldacci, De Chirico, 166).
13. Philippe Renaud, Lecture d’Apollinaire (Lausanne: Édition l’Âge
d’Homme, 1969), 282-286.
14. The passage reads in full: “Il est intéressant, pour ne pas dire
plus, que ce motif apparaisse dans les deux poèmes qui encadrent Ondes,
le premier étant même une sorte de poème-préface imprimé en italiques :
ainsi toute la première partie de Calligrammes parait placée sous le signe
de la rupture et de l’affirmation conjointes de certains liens. (Nous ne
serions pas surpris d’apprendre—se cela se révèle possible un jour—que
ce dut être, à cette époque, une des préoccupations principales
d’Apollinaire).” Renaud, Lecture d’Apollinaire, 273-274.
15. Julius Meier-Graefe, Der Autumn Böcklin und die Lehre von den
Einheiten (Stuttgart: J. Hoffmann, 1905). For a discussion of the way in
which de Chirico’s view of Böcklin developed in opposition to Graefe’s,
see Baldacci, De Chirico, 36-38.
16. De Chirico, “Eluard Manuscripts,” in Hebdomeros (Cambridge:
Exact Change, 1992), 184-185. De Chirico’s early writings, unpublished
at the time, were collected by a few of his later admirers. The earliest of
the two posthumously published manuscripts (1911 to 1913) was in
Paul Eluard’s collection, while the later (1913 to 1914) was held by Jean
Paulhan. André Breton holds a number of de Chirico’s writings expected
to be released with the rest of the poet’s private collection. See Giovanni
Lista’s introduction to the collected early writings of de Chirico, in
Giovanni Lista, L’Art métaphysique (Paris: L’Échoppe, 1994), 40.
17. De Chirico, “Arnold Böcklin” [originally 1920], in Massimo
Carrà, ed., Metaphysical Art. trans. Caroline Tisdall (New York: Praeger
Publishers, 1971), 139.
18. For an account of the relation between de Chirico’s work and the
Freudian concept of the uncanny, see Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), 63-73.
19. De Chirico (1920), cited in Baldacci, De Chirico, 74.
20. See Baldacci, De Chirico, 48-49.
21. Ariadne as an abandoned woman is one of two well-established
depictions of the story. The other depicts her as a figure of joy and liber-
ation at the moment when she is discovered by Dionysus. Efforts by
scholars (such Bohn, Baldacci, and dell’Arco) to associate Ariadne with
Nietzsche’s conception of the Dionysian have yet to address the fact that
SECAC Review Vol.XV No. 1
de Chirico’s depiction of Ariadne belongs to a very different pictorial tra-
dition. If his intention was to approach the philosopher’s “gay science,”
why would he have neglected this alternative iconographic source? The
persistent association of Ariadne with melancholy and mourning sug-
gests that Böcklin’s example was for de Chirico more pertinent than that
of Nietzsche.
22. For an excellent account of the iconographic complexities of the
Ariadne series, see the essays by Michael R. Taylor and Matthew Gale in
Giorgio de Chirico and the Myth of Ariadne, ed. Michael R. Taylor
(Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2003).
23. For discussions of de Chirico’s use of Reinach’s drawings, see
Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco, “De Chirico in Paris, 1911-1915,” in
William Rubin, ed., De Chirico (New York: Museum of Modern Art,
1982), 32; and Paolo Baldacci, “Le classicisme chez Giorgio de Chirico:
Théorie et méthode,” Cahiers du Musée National d’Art Moderne, no. 11
(1983): 19-31.
24. Apollinaire, L’Europe nouvelle 13 (April 1918), in Apollinaire,
Apollinaire on Art, 461.
25. Duchamp replied to a question regarding Apollinaire’s statement
in The Cubist Painters (“It will perhaps be reserved for an artist as dis-
engaged from aesthetic preoccupations, as occupied with energy as
Marcel Duchamp, to reconcile Art and the People”), with the following:
“He [Apollinaire] would say anything. Nothing could have given him the
basis for writing such a sentence. Let’s say that he sometimes guessed
what I was going to do, but ‘to reconcile Art and the People,’ what a
joke! That’s all Apollinaire!… He wrote whatever came to him. It was
no doubt poetic, in his opinion, but neither truthful nor exactly analyti-
cal.” (Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Duchamp trans. Ron Padgett
(New York: Da Capo Press, 1987), 37-38.
26. Wieland Schmied’s assessment is characteristic: “[De Chirico]
spent a short time in Italy, more or less as a foreigner, before leaving, this
time for Paris, where he developed his own style in isolation outside the
mainstream of modernism.” (Wieland Schmied, “De Chirico,
Metaphysical Painting and the International Avant-Garde: Twelve
Theses,” in Italian Art in the Twentieth Century, 1900-1988, ed. Emily
Braun (London: Prestel, 1989), 71-80.
27. Rubin singles out the work of Jean Cassou and James Thrall
Soby in particular. William Rubin, “De Chirico et la modernité,”
Giorgio de Chirico (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou), 1983, 9-37.
Baldacci considers de Chirico’s adoption of modernist techniques (of
which he mentions those of van Gogh, Gauguin, Vallotton and Picasso)
as “purely functional appropriation.” (Baldacci, De Chirico, 152).
28. Rubin, however, treats de Chirico’s relation to cubism as he does
the painter’s relation to other modernist practices, namely as a parallel
formation indicative of a common Zeitgeist.
29. Rubin provides a discussion of the non-corporeality of the bodies
in the last Ariadne works (Rubin, “De Chirico et la modernité,” 15).
30. See Leo Steinberg, “The Philosophical Brothel,” October, 44
(Spring 1988): 7-74.
31. Apollinaire, “Cubisme,” L’Intermédiaire des chercheurs et des
curieux, October 10, 1912. (Apollinaire, Apollinaire on Art, 256-258.)
32. De Chirico, “Eluard Manuscript,” 176.
33. Rosalind Krauss, “The Motivation of the Sign,” in William
Rubin, ed., Picasso and Braque: A Symposium (New York: Museum of
Modern Art, 1992), 261-286. (This citation is from page 271).
34. As Krauss put it with regard to Picasso’s consideration of the
painting Ma Jolie: “Picasso’s declaration… that his ‘great love’ for Eva
Gouel will be transcribed into his work in the form of something ‘I will
write in my paintings.’” (Krauss, “The Motivation of the Sign,” 271).
15