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Magritte The Lovers 1928 1
1. René Magritte The Lovers 1928
2. Giorgio de Chirico The Great Tower 1914

Railway Stations and Minotaurs: gender in the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico and Pablo Picasso
When the young Magritte recovered his mother’s lifeless body from the river in which she had committed suicide, her head was covered by her white nightdress (Fig. 1).

The history of creative expression provides numerous examples of cathartic transference, from ancient bulbous fecund goddesses to post-pagan crucifixion scenes, to the sublime feelings associated with landscape painting and the philosophy of aesthetics and beauty in general. Its portrayal is not confined to painting or sculpture and a particularly poignant example of hypercathexis or excessive object transference is depicted in Orson Welles’ film Citizen Kane (1941). It occurs in the sequence when Kane, on his deathbed, barely audibly mutters his last dying words...Rosebud, Rosebud. The intriguing Rosebud turns out not to be the name of his wife, mother, mansion, yacht, or even his vast publishing empire, but the name he gave to his boyhood sled, which slipped from his grasp one blustery winters day, never to be seen again.

In the parent, loss and creativity thesis it is significant that both artists were incredibly prolific over a long period of time (approaching eight decades), because this facilitates the examination of their paternal and maternal tendencies at different periods in their oeuvre. During the process of either initiating new art movements or significantly contributing to their development, both artists maintained strong personal identities. In fact, their obsessional need to create bordered on a near pathological desire to be prolific, which in some instances led them to be purposefully repetitive. This is a condition that often manifests itself when trauma, caused by childhood loss, becomes a formative and focal element in an artist’s work. For example Philip Guston, who was influenced by both De Chirico and Picasso, could well be cited as just such an artist. He too suffered parental loss at a young age, which resulted in a prolific amount of cathartic paintings in his final years, much of which can be traced back to childhood trauma.

The incapacity to come to terms with childhood or adolescent loss is one of the mainstays of psychoanalytical theory concerning certain aspects of creativity, and one might add, obsessional forms of prolific creativity. “What is it our pleasure to paint today?” …was a phrase that De Chirico would recite each morning when sitting down in front of his easel. In some instances he would paint the same theme over and over again, as in the Piazza d’Italia series of paintings (Fig. 2). They are without doubt his most restated compositions and numerous examples were painted during his lifetime. Some critics have attributed this repetitive act to purely mercenary gain, mental laziness or lack of inspiration. However, even a cursory reading of these works reveals the significance behind their formulaic compositions. Put simply, their iconography reveals them to be a type of ex-voto painting and as such places them outside of any modernist canons of reductive uniqueness. On the contrary they reaffirm ancient visual practices involving metaphysical perspective and its relationship to dissolution and becoming.

The Great Tower 1914 de Chirico 2
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