Peinture métaphysique

Metaphysical painting (pittura metafisica) or metaphysical art was a style of painting developed by the Italian artists Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà. The movement began in 1910 with de Chirico, whose dreamlike works with sharp contrasts of light and shadow often had a vaguely threatening, mysterious quality, "painting that which cannot be seen". De Chirico, his younger brother Alberto Savinio, and Carrà formally established the school and its principles in 1917. Giorgio de Chirico, unlike many artists of his generation, found little to admire in the works of Cézanne and other French modernists, but was inspired by the paintings of the Swiss Symbolist Arnold Böcklin and the work of German artists such as Max Klinger. His painting The Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon (c. 1910) is considered his first Metaphysical work; it was inspired by what de Chirico called a "revelation" that he experienced in Piazza Santa Croce in Florence. In subsequent works he developed a disquieting imagery of deserted squares, often bordered by steeply receding arcades shown in a raking light. Tiny figures in the distance cast long shadows, or in place of figures there are featureless dressmakers' mannequins. The effect was to produce a sense of dislocation in time and space. In 1913, Guillaume Apollinaire made the first use of the term "metaphysical" to describe de Chirico's paintings. In February 1917, the Futurist painter Carlo Carrà met de Chirico in Ferrara, where they were both stationed during World War I. Carrà developed a variant of the Metaphysical style in which the dynamism of his earlier work was replaced by immobility, and the two artists worked together for several months in 1917 at a military hospital in Ferrara. According to art historian Jennifer Mundy, "Carrà adopted de Chirico's imagery of mannequins set in claustrophobic spaces, but his works lacked de Chirico's sense of irony and enigma, and he always retained a correct perspective". After an exhibition of Carrà's work in Milan in December 1917, critics began to write of Carrà as the inventor of Metaphysical painting, to de Chirico's chagrin.