Giorgio de Chirico - Ariadne

This composition presents one of the artist's famous deserted public squares rendered in simple broad forms. Somber monolithic arches on the right cast a heavy geometric shadow filling two�thirds of the right foreground. On the left, seen slightly from above and in a vertical perspective, is the statue of the sleeping Ariadne. The background is sealed by a brick wall, beyond which rises a squat white tower. A distant train approaches from the left, a sailing ship from the right. The palette consists of ocher, deep brown, white, and green.

"Ariadne" is part of a series of five paintings, all of 1913, in which the statue of Ariadne plays a major iconographic role. This statue is a Roman copy of a lost Hellenistic sculpture of Ariadne asleep on the island of Naxos, where she had been abandoned by Theseus. The sculpture of Ariadne had great symbolic meaning for de Chirico, perhaps evoking the classical past to which he had been exposed during his childhood in Greece. In these works Ariadne is seen from various angles, horizontally, vertically, and in partial close-up. The most important paintings in the series are "Ariadne," "The Soothsayers Recompence" (1913; Philadelphia Museum of Art), and "The Silent Statue" (1913; formerly Jean Paulhan, Paris).

"Ariadne" is executed in the dry, thin manner that characterizes de Chirico's works of 1913�14. The artist created this composition, which belongs to his most elegiac early period, while living in Paris (1911�15). The "early" de Chirico, still a painter of simple and magical dreamlike pictures, as exemplified by "Ariadne," became one of the acknowledged predecessors of the Surrealists.

Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art
________________________________________________________________________

This post is part of an art assignment to research a painting,document this research and produce an interpretation of said painting. Such is the power of the internet and the immediate quality of blogging.