Metaphysical Painting

Metaphysical Painting

Artistic Movements, Periods and Styles in 5 Points

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Metaphysical Painting

• It is a movement created in Italy by Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà (1916 -1921). The artists did not seek to represent faithfully the world around them, the aim was to show other realities: the subjective reality of the artists. The one they interpreted, imagined, or the reality they discovered by diving into the unconscious.
• The proposal of Metaphysical Painting is to represent the mystery of what lies beyond the visible reality (precisely, the word “metaphysical” refers to what is beyond the physical world).
• The first thing we notice when we see a Metaphysical Painting is that it looks like a representation of a dream. That is why we can say that metaphysical painting “recreates dreamlike environments.” We find deserted squares, solitary buildings of classical architecture, statues, trains, and mannequins. Recognizable, common objects that become disturbing, enigmatic, as if they were keeping a terrible secret.
• As a result, a new reality was generated, as strange as a silent nightmare, absurd and full of loneliness. The metaphysicians showed us a different reality while implying with sarcasm that the reality in which we lived was not less absurd, odd, mysterious, or lonely than the one they presented. (It was the time of World War I).
• Metaphysical Painting was the inspiration for Surrealism. The Surrealists consider that their greatest influence was that of De Chirico. What we have to keep in mind is that although both movements explore what is beyond reality (“surrealism” means “what is above reality”), the Surrealists do it by liberating their unconscious in the creative process (what is called “psychic automatism”), and the metaphysicians, on the other hand, choose “consciously” the symbolic elements that are the protagonists of their enigmatic dreams.

Representative artists: Carrà, De Chirico, Morandi.

Image: Mother and Son (1918). Carlo Carrà.

Recommended links:

The Disquieting Muses.

Giorgio de Chirico and His Uninhabited Architecture.

The “Avant-garde” movements.

Surrealism.

The Treachery of Images, Magritte.

The Persistence of Memory, Salvador Dalí.

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