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Lot Essay
Apparizione della ciminiera (Apparition of the Chimney) is a work long thought to have belonged to de Chirico’s first metaphysical period between 1910 and 1919 but now believed to date from the years of 1939-44. During this wartime period, de Chirico was living in self-imposed obscurity in Florence with Isabella Pakszwer Far, the Russian Jewish woman who soon afterwards was to become his wife. Apparizione della ciminiera is a comparatively rare example from this dramatic period in that it shows de Chirico revisiting his much-celebrated earlier style of working in order to create an entirely new ‘metaphysical’ composition. Normally, in his revistations of his own past, de Chirico would rework new versions of famous old compositions, such as his Disquieting Muses, Piazza d’Italia or Hector and Andromache paintings. Here, however, it seems, that de Chirico has created an entirely new composition. One that, with its elongated colonnades and ‘surprising’ chimney is reminiscent of earlier pictures like The Anxious Journey of 1913 (Museum of Modern Art, New York), or The Surprise of 1914, (Williams College Museum of Art, Massachusetts).
Because he believed time to be not just relative but also wholly arbitrary to the concept of poetry or painting, and because many Surrealists, with whom he had fallen out, were seeking throughout the 1930s to sabotage everything but his earliest work, it was de Chirico’s common practice in such later ‘metaphysical’ paintings to back date them. This work is no exception. It has, in fact, been double-dated by the artist as being made in both 1916 and 1917. What distinguishes it as a work not from this first metaphysical period but somewhat later is the Cubist-like collation of arches that, Piranesi-like, form a bizarre and impossible architectural construction of form at the base of the painting. These arches, along with some of the rest of the architecture in the painting appear to echo something of the atmosphere of the neo-classical architecture Mussolini commissioned in the 1930s for the EUR district in Rome.
Because he believed time to be not just relative but also wholly arbitrary to the concept of poetry or painting, and because many Surrealists, with whom he had fallen out, were seeking throughout the 1930s to sabotage everything but his earliest work, it was de Chirico’s common practice in such later ‘metaphysical’ paintings to back date them. This work is no exception. It has, in fact, been double-dated by the artist as being made in both 1916 and 1917. What distinguishes it as a work not from this first metaphysical period but somewhat later is the Cubist-like collation of arches that, Piranesi-like, form a bizarre and impossible architectural construction of form at the base of the painting. These arches, along with some of the rest of the architecture in the painting appear to echo something of the atmosphere of the neo-classical architecture Mussolini commissioned in the 1930s for the EUR district in Rome.