The Artist

In Metaphysical Self Portrait De Chirico unequivocally states his interest in the wall as a potent psychological sign (fig.1). In this painting he depicts himself pointing behind a wall while his spectral self motions in the direction of an open window. Like the Romano-Campanian paintings in the tragic-style, this painting also makes us aware of a landscape beyond the room, an unattainable, unknowable landscape made known to us by a mysterious, phantom-like figure.  In an extended essay on the German artist Max Klinger (1857-1920), De Chirico articulated his own rather melancholic view of the wall motif. In particular he refers to a painting by Klinger entitled The Walk… “In front of a long low wall constructed of bricks are a few men who are walking in the sun and their shadows are thrown in profile onto the earth and rise on the wall. The horizon is empty. That wall seems to mark the end of the world, it seems that behind it there must be the void.  The sense of boredom and of infinite dismay, the question posed by the line of the horizon infuses the whole painting: the figures, the earth, the shadows and the light.” (The painting he is describing is mostly likely Klinger's Spaziergänger (The Walker) painted in 1878, fig. 2).

The image of the wall as an important psychological sign linked to that of the voyager, appears for the first time in 1910 in two seminal paintings – The Enigma of the Oracle and The Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon (fig.3-4). These paintings initiate De Chirico’s lifelong obsession with Böcklin’s shadowy figure of the forlorn voyager depicted in Odysseus and Calypso. In which Odysseus contemplates the possibility that he will never return home. Not only did it provide De Chirico with an emblematic image of the lost voyager, but also a Casper David Friedrich-like (1774-1840) figure that enigmatically stares towards the horizon beyond which lies the infinite “void” (fig.5). In the Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon, produced at the outset of his career, De Chirico personalises this image by depicting it as a statue on top of a plinth bearing his initials. The stone figure looks over the wall towards the sails of a boat that ambiguously connotes arrival or departure.