Giorgio de Chirico

LIFE AND PAINTINGS

FABIO BENZI

This is the most comprehensive volume probing the life and work of the modern art icon Giorgio de Chirico.

Giorgio de Chirico was one of the most controversial and consequential artists of the twentieth century—a key member of the Paris avant-garde, he was a major inuence on other artists, especially the nascent surrealists. His repertoire of motifs—empty arcades, elongated shadows, mannequins, trains —created images of forlorn emptiness that became iconic.

Artists inspired by de Chirico’s early work include Yves Tanguy, Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, and René Magritte. His inuence also extended beyond painting and included writers and poets Guillaume Apollinaire, André Breton, John Ashbery, and Sylvia Plath, lmmakers Jacques Prévert and Michelangelo Antonioni, and even David Bowie, who admired de Chirico’s genderless tailors’ dummies that inspired his music videos.

After the Great War, he turned toward neoclassicism and bitterly fell out with the surrealists and the mainstream modernist movement—in the process, becoming an outspoken outsider of the art world.

This in-depth examination of the artist’s life and work by the world’s foremost de Chirico authority is based on new archival research and oers a fresh view of de Chirico’s relationship with surrealism, fascism, forgery, and the European avantgardes.

Fabio Benzi is considered the world’s foremost expert on Giorgio de Chirico. He is a professor at the University of ChietiPescara and a board member of Fondazione de Chirico, and he has curated exhibitions in Rome, Venice, Milan, Moscow, Paris, Vienna, New York, Tel Aviv, Istanbul, and London.

BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY

555 pages, 6½ x 9¼" 60 color and b/w illustrations Hardcover • 9780847872381 $55.00 USD, $75.00 CAD, £42.50 GBP April 25, 2023 Rights: World English

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