Meaning Influential

For this lesson,you will require a dictionary.According to dictionary.com

Nostalgia noun
1.A wistful desire to return in thought or in fact to a former time in one's life, to one's home or homeland, or to one's family and friends; a sentimental yearning for the happiness of a former place or time.
2.Something that elicits or displays nostalgia.
3. The condition of being homesick; homesickness.

Infinite adjective
1.Immeasurably great: an infinite capacity for forgiveness.
2.Indefinitely or exceedingly great: infinite sums of money.
3.Unlimited or unmeasurable in extent of space, duration of time, etc.: the infinite nature of outer space.
4.Unbounded or unlimited; boundless; endless: God's infinite mercy.
5.Mathematics.
a.Not finite.
b.(of a set) having elements that can be put into one-to-one correspondence with a
subset that is not the given set.

Infinite noun
6.Something that is infinite.
7.Mathematics. an infinite quantity or magnitude.
8.The boundless regions of space.
9.The Infinite or the Infinite Being, God.

10.The unlimited expanse in which everything is located; "they tested his ability to locate objects in space"; "the boundless regions of the infinite".

Influences
De Chirico won praise for his work almost immediately from writer Guillaume Apollinaire, who helped to introduce his work to the later Surrealists.

Yves Tanguy wrote how one day in 1922 he saw one of De Chirico's paintings in an art dealer's window, and was so impressed by it he resolved on the spot to become an artist — although he had never even held a brush.

Other artists who acknowledged De Chirico's influence include Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, and Philip Guston. De Chirico strongly influenced the Surrealist movement.

Michelangelo Antonioni, the Italian film director, also claimed to be influenced by De Chirico. Some comparison can be made to the long takes in Antonioni's films from the 1960s, in which the camera continues to linger on desolate cityscapes populated by a few distant figures, or none at all, in the absence of the film's protagonists.

Modern photographer Duane Michals was also influenced by De Chirico.

John Ashbery has called Hebdomeros "probably...the finest [major work of Surrealist fiction]." [1]

Fumito Ueda's critically acclaimed Playstation 2 game Ico (and also its sequel, Shadow of the Colossus, in a less direct way) was strongly influenced by de Chirico. Both games feature children wandering though huge, ancient and otherwise uninhabited buildings, are predominately yellow and green in colour and use music only for cut-scenes, enhancing the feeling of space and sparseness. The box art for Ico used in Japan and Europe is particularly imitative of de Chirico's Melancholy and Mystery of a Street and The Nostalgia of the Infinite.

The 1914 painting Melancholy and Mystery of a Street was used as the cover for the "adult version" UK paperback edition of Philip Pullman's The Subtle Knife, part of the His Dark Materials trilogy. It is appropriate considering the novel's setting of a southern European-looking town that was abandoned by all but a few disowned children.

De Chirico's 1915 painting The Seer (or The Prophet) is featured on the cover of jazz pianist Thelonious Monk's 1958 album Misterioso.

Personally I belive The Lost Thing by Shaun Tan has some inspiration to de Chirico's work. But that is a personal consideration by me.
(c)by Shaun Tan

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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.

Another biography

Giorgio de Chirico

The Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978), acclaimed by the surreallists as a forerunner of their movement, founded the school of metaphysical painting.

Giorgio de Chirico was born on July 10, 1888, in Volos, Greece, the son of an engineer from Palermo. The family settled in Athens, where De Chirico studied art at the Polytechnic Institute. His earliest works were landscapes and seascapes.

After the death of his father in 1905 De Chirico, attracted by the German neoromantic school of painting, moved to Munich. There he saw the paintings of Arnold Böcklin and discovered the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, which exercised a great influence on him.

The attraction of Böcklin for De Chirico is best understood from the artist's own words: "Böcklin knew how to create an entire world of his own of a surprising lyricism, combining the preternaturalism of the Italian landscape with architectural elements." De Chirico also spoke of the metaphysical power with which "Böcklin always springs from the precision and clarity of a definite apparition." These statements describe the characteristics of De Chirico's own art.

In 1909 De Chirico went to Italy. The following year he began to execute the paintings that became characteristic of his style, such as the Enigma of the Oracle and the Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon. This style he developed further in Paris between 1911 and 1915, where he worked in isolation and in poor health. When he exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in 1913, Guillaume Apollinaire called him "the most astonishing painter of his time."

De Chirico had to return to Italy for his military service and was stationed in Ferrara (1915-1918). The architecture of that city, with its far perspectives, deepened his sense of the mysterious. In 1917 he met the painter Carlo Carrà at the military hospital in Ferrara, and they launched the metaphysical school (Scuola Metafisica) of painting, which attempted to create a new order of reality based on metaphysics. Giorgio Morandi, Ardengo Soffici, Filippo de Pisis, Alberto Savinio (De Chirico's brother), and Mario Sironi soon became members of the circle.

Characteristics of His Art

The art of De Chirico centers upon the antithesis between classical culture and modern mechanistic civilization. These two elements are locked in a desperate struggle, and the tragic quality of this situation exudes an aura of melancholy of which De Chirico is a prime exponent. The iconographic elements of his early art - modern railways and clock towers combined with ancient architecture - are to be sought in the artist's childhood memories of Greece. For the strange visual images in which De Chirico cast his mature works (1911-1918), he used an airless dreamlike space in his townscapes with an exaggerated perspective artificially illuminated, with long sinister shadows, and strewn about with antique statues. There is an elegiac loneliness too (the Delights of the Poet, 1913) and the disturbing juxtaposition of such banal everyday objects as biscuits and rubber gloves with those of mythical significance. And De Chirico's new man has no face; he is a dummy (Hector and Andromache, 1917).

A favorite amusement of ancient Greece was the composition of enigmas. In De Chirico's art they symbolize an endangered transitional period of European culture. From the enigma to the riddle presented by one's dream life is but a short step.

Late Works

De Chirico moved to Rome in 1918, and on the occasion of an exhibition that year he was hailed as a great avant-garde master. A year later he became one of the leaders of Valori Plastici, a group of painters espousing traditional plastic values which dominated the artistic scene in Italy at that time. In 1919 an exhibition of De Chirico's works in Berlin made a deep impression on the central European Dadaists. Between 1920 and 1924 his art underwent numerous fluctuations.

In 1925 De Chirico returned to Paris, where the French proclaimed him one of the masters of surrealism. He, however, had quarreled with the Dadaists and surrealists (he corresponded intensely between 1920 and 1925 with Paul éluard and André Breton) and had left this stage of his development far behind.

In Paris, De Chirico designed scenery and costumes for the Ballets Suédois and the Ballets Monte Carlo and began to paint a series of ruins, wild horses, and gladiators. After 1929, the year in which he published a strange dream novel, Hebdomeros, he changed his style entirely, renounced his adherence to the modern movement, and from then on, living in Rome, became not only a fierce critic of modernism but an academic painter of neoclassic character. He died in 1978.

Out of Answers.com
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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.

Painting Assignment - Development

A look into my visual diary.
A look at some of my planning,looks like. After I did the copy(picture coming!) I took on the suggestion of my class mates,to make the tower twist. A friend says it looks like the tower melted.

So I moved on and tried a free-form kind of approach. I had a better picture in my mind so of course,it never came out. I tried to make a tower that had a lot of empty space but it also went up. I don't know if that makes sense. But I think the tower is supposed to be a memory of infinity or is a representation of infinite space. I will write more later.

13th May- According to my teacher,I can have my own opinions as part of my research for this assignment. Looking even harder at the picture and trying to figure out just what it is all about. I might be on the right track with it,maybe the title is somewhat misleading. It might relate to the Tower of Babylon,which was supposably a tower that went on for ever. So the 'tower series' by de Chirico may be a continuation of this - a tower is really a big,long building constructed to go as high as mechanically possible.

Another way of looking at this picture/series is as a continuing theme of searching for a retreat. Everyone likes to have their own private space. It could also be a look into a strange fantasy world. Though I kind of like that idea,lonely towers that go upwards to some dizzy height in a empty world that is barely inhabited. It's very open to interpretation,so what I write here could be right.



Incidently if you look at the next progression of idea development,it looks very simular to another of the Tower Series known as the Great Tower. Perhaps the other ones are all aspiring to become like this monument. I don't know where I was heading,I think I was trying to create this space that was a construction that was open or lead up to somewhere. It's annoying when I can see it in my head by not have it translate to paper!


Something of a final development stage - it of course changed while I was painting it. I think I was going for a long and thin tower with archways that went somewhere or perhaps didn't make sense. I think I'll always be in some fantasical landscape.

Some article on de Chirico - I haven't read it since it might upload spyware on my computer. You have been warned!!
Some notes or a report someone did on de Chirico
A poem based on the Nostalgia of the Infinite
Exposure to the ideas of modern mathematics has led artists to attempt to depict graphically the haunting qualities of the infinite. - An article on modern mathematics

"magic unreality and poetic sensibility of metaphysical images" - de Chirico's work as described by here


Guess who?
He studied art in Athens before moving to Paris where he created such unusual works as "Toys of a Prince", "Sweet Afternoon", and "Nostalgia of the Infinite". Influenced by the writings of Apollinaire and Nietzsche, he founded the movement called "pittura metafisica". For 10 points, name this Italian artist known for long shadows and exaggerated perspectives such as those in "Mystery and Melancholy of a Street."
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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.

Giorgio de Chirico - The Nostalgia of the Infinite

The subject of the painting is a large tower. The scene is struck by low, angular evening light. In the foreground below the tower are two small shadowy figures reminiscent of those in future works by Salvador Dalí. This painting is the most famous example of the tower theme which appears in several of de Chirico’s works.

Though the painting is dated 1911, this date is generally held in question. It has been speculated by the Museum of Modern Art in New York that it was created from 1912 to 1913 while the Annenberg School for Communication suggests 1913-14.

Stealing from here again
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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.

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
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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.

Giorgio de Chirico - Some notes

The term "metaphysical" represented to de Chirico a search for the essential meaning hidden behind the surface of objects. He believed that objects acquire various meanings when imbued with the memory of their viewer. If that which de Chirico called the "chain of memories" is broken, the objects acquire a new and disquieting guise, "a ghostly and metaphysical aspect that only a few individuals can see in moments of clairvoyance and metaphysical abstraction. The architecture of Turin and Ferrara, with their solemn porticoed streets and wide piazzas was for de Chirico the most appropriate setting for these images - locomotive trains, statues, silhouettes - which are frozen and outside the flow of time. The depth of perspective in these vistas is often fictitious, and the canvases often contain contradictions that subtly underscore the sensation of estrangement and anguish that fascinated the Surrealists. De Chirico confined himself to this repertoire between about 1912 and 1919. Thtroughout his career he returned intermittently to these Metaphysical themes which, while they identify him as a painter for art historians, still do not exhause the range of his oeuvre.

Could be from here or here

The warm colors and familiar icons in the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico are deceptively soothing. The varying lines of perspective, blurring of indoor and outdoor space, and the coupling of ancient images with turn-of-the-century industry are both vaguely familiar and certainly disconcerting, evocative of being lost in a city or wandering through a stranger's home. Vacant plazas, shadowy arcades, and lonely statues are the eerie edges of dreams that are lost in the morning. Even de Chirico's most standard still lifes are ambient and consuming.

Swallowing a tidbit
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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.

Giorgio de Chirico vs. The Aura of Credability!

Found while trawling the web,I can finally present some noteworthy research and abuse the Ctrl-C and V functions of my keyboard.

This post's sponser is Migraine Aura

More hilarity ensured if you click on above link!

The Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico is more and more appreciated as one of the emblematic figures of 20th century art. He has developed the style of "metaphysical art" and is seen as one of the forerunners of surrealism. Whereas current interpretations of his work by art historians and art critics focus on the literary and philosophical sources of de Chirico's poetics, e.g. the writings from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, the British neurologist G.N. Fuller and the art historian M.V. Gale suggested, in a paper published as early as 1988 in the British Medical Journal, that migraine with aura may have acted as a basis for several unusual and recurrent features of his "Pittura metafisica".

Reconsidering the notion of de Chirico's migraine aura as source of his artistic inspiration, Ubaldo Nicola and Klaus Podoll have systematically examined his published works as painter and writer, including his "Memoirs", the semi-autobiographical novels "Hebdomeros" and "Mister Dudron" and his collected essays. References to migraine aura symptoms were identified according to phenomenal similarities not only with clinical descriptions of such phenomena as established in neurological semeiology, but also with the paintings and drawings from the Migraine Art collection which currently consists of 562 pieces.

The available documents provided unexpectedly rich evidence for a diagnosis of migraine with aura, as summarized in the monograph "The aura of Giorgio de Chirico - Migraine Art and Metaphysical Painting".


As an expansion of Fuller' and Gale's previously reported findings, it was possible to document familiarity, childhood onset and a wide range of symptoms of de Chirico's migraine with aura as described in his writings. Blanke and Landis (2003) objected that the available evidence suggests a diagnosis of temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) rather than migraine, but major criticisms can be raised against their selection and interpretation of data (Podoll and Nicola, 2004) and according to the present author's opinion they failed to demonstrate convincing links between the assumed diagnosis of TLE and de Chirico's metaphysical painting (Blanke and Landis, 2004).


Giorgio de Chirico's revelation in Florence, 1909

"... let me recount how I had the revelation of a picture that I will show this year at the Salon d'Automne, entitled Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon. One clear autumnal afternoon I was sitting on a bench in the middle of the Piazza Santa Croce in Florence. It was of course not the first time I had seen this square. I had just come out of a long and painful intestinal illness [abdominal migraine], and I was in a nearly morbid state of sensitivity [hypersensitivity to light and noise; migraine aura phenomena]. The whole world, down to the marble of the buildings and the fountains, seemed to me to be convalescent. In the middle of the square rises a statue of Dante draped in a long cloak, holding his works clasped against his body, his laurel-crowned head bent thoughtfully earthward. The statue is in white marble, but time has given it a grey cast, very agreeable to the eye [photophobia]. The autumn sun, warm and unloving [photophobia; exposure to sun as trigger factor of migraine attack], lit the statue and the church façade. Then I had the strange impression that I was looking at all these things for the first time [jamais vu], and the composition of my picture came to my mind's eye. Now each time I look at this painting I again see that moment. Nevertheless the moment is an enigma to me, for it is inexplicable. And I like also to call the work which sprang from it an enigma."

A question on migraine headaches − Excerpts from a Usenet Newsgroups discussion

"I am curious to know where most surrealists stand on the use of drugs (both illegal and legal), and the sensations brought about by the loss of blood to the brain (the headache). Are these manipulations of the mind (brought about by outside forces and internal loss), plausible to categorize under the surrealist experience?"

(Brandon J. Freels, Newsgroups: alt.surrealism, Re: Question on Drugs and Headaches, October 20, 1998)

"yes."

(J. Michael, Newsgroups:alt.surrealism, Re: Question on Drugs and Headaches, October 20, 1998)

"Migraine Headaches have been claimed by some sufferers to induce a trance-like state during which they experience enhanced creativity. [...] I say, take your inspiration from wherever you can get it... its quicksilver glimmerings mayn't be stored for long, so you must warehouse as many inspirational inspirations as possible. Just be sure to have a lot of aspirin on hand..."

(elag, Newsgroups:alt.surrealism, Re: Question on Drugs and Headaches, October 20, 1998)

"The reason why I posted my question is due to my own contradictory views. On one hand I see the use of drugs as unsurreal, because you are experiencing the drug, and not yourself − but in cases of bodily transformations (headache, fever, etc) you are not experiencing yourself either, but the loss or gain of something into the body. But I also am wondering if one can not achieve the surrealist view by subsiding to what we consider today to be 'healthy,' or even a 'healthy mindset' therefore verifying the use of drugs, and any other effect on the body as a positive way to create the surrealist experience. So maybe now people understand my self induced confusion. It seems that the only surrealist experiences I have are based on some physical or mental trauma, and if this is so they why shouldn't the drug induced trauma be considered surrealist also? I simple don't know how to answer my own question."

(Brandon J. Freels, Newsgroups:alt.surrealism, Re: Question on Drugs and Headaches, October 21, 1998)

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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.