Giorgio de Chirico (1888 –1978) was an Italian artist who founded the Metaphysical art movement, which profoundly influenced the surrealists (1). He worked with a series of painting styles throughout his life. In the 1910s, for example, he created classically inspired empty town squares. De Chirico stated, “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” (2). He believed that art should not be rational. Then, later in his career, in the 1920s, he began to adopt qualities of Renaissance and Baroque art. This caused reproach from his supporters because Renaissance art is very structured, it makes sense to the human mind, and this form of art goes against his previous belief.
Giorgio de Chirico, The Double Dream of Spring, 1915 is oil on canvas. The painting has earthly colors; about half of the painting is blue and the other half has shades of gray, brown, green, tan, and red. It is divided into three scenes. On the left there is a depiction of a statue that seems to be looking up into the sky. On the right hand side there is a red figure that seems to be the head of a man. Along the middle of the painting there is a vertical wooden stand holding a sketch done on a canvas. This sketch is very geometrical and the background is the same color as the sky.
As we discussed in the classroom, Modern art is characterized by: loss of faith, cynicism, alienation, interest in incoherence, interest in fragmentation, resistance to narrative coherence, and other. In this painting one can see the interest in fragmentation in the unfinished sketch at the center of the artwork. One can also see alienation because the figures are fairly distanced from each other.
In this painting there is the presence of inanimate human looking figures. For example, the statue represents a person but it has no life given that it is a statue. There are a couple of stick figures in the background but they too are inanimate. Finally, there is the red head of a dummy, it seems to represent a man but there is no life either. This is a lifeless piece of artwork.
What drew me to this piece was the contrast of color. The blue sky and the red head really stood out to me amongst the brown, green, gray, and tan. It was interesting to see a blue canvas with a sketch inside a painting. There is a painting inside a painting, this interested me, and the title of the work describes it as being a dream within a dream. Given that both dreams depict inanimate figures, does this mean that the person dreaming this felt inanimate also?