Railway Stations and Minotaurs

Pablo Picasso fondly referred to Giorgio De Chirico as the painter of railway stations. De Chirico, in an equally brief but admiring comment, described Picasso as a painter of bullfights and big women. This seemingly casual summary of each others oeuvre was more astute than either may have realized.

The following text expands on the implied gender difference contained in their brief summaries and proposes that it was determined by patriarchal and matriarchal affiliations, which implicitly and explicitly dominated the work of these influential artists.

In "Limits Not Frontiers of Surrealism", André Breton*, the most influential of the Surrealist writers and theoreticians, claimed that in 1914 the “...intervention of Picasso and Chirico in the domain of painting,” caused "...visual forms of representation” to dramatically change. *

In terms of gender influences these artists were diametrically opposed, one driven by the paternal family line, the other by the maternal, one seeking after the physical and the Dionysian, the other after the metaphysical and the Apollonian.

* Breton 1937: Eng., trans.1971, in Surrealism, edited by Herbert Read p.102.

The gender influences that shaped the oeuvre of both De Chirico and Picasso were not the product of parental presence, but the far more impacting condition caused by parental loss. Trauma resulting from loss is one of the most disturbing experiences that our psyche may have to confront, and nowhere more so than in the susceptible mind of a child or adolescent. A certain amount has already been written on this theme in relation to the pathological development of artists, for example: Sigmund Freud on Leonardo (1919); Robert Liebert on Michelangelo (1983); and Martha Wolfenstein on René Magritte (1974). The pathographic link between Magritte’s paintings and the trauma caused by his mother’s suicide, which occurred during his adolescence, has drawn the clinical gaze of several psychoanalysts. Its visual depiction in his paintings is explicit and therefore a ripe model for expressing and reinforcing psychoanalytical theories concerned with trauma. On the other hand Giorgio de Chirico’s infinitely more complex compositions shaped by paternal loss have been passed over by the selfsame group. This is a surprising oversight given Magritte’s declaration that on seeing De Chirico’s The Song of Love (1914) he broke down and cried because for the first time he realised that painting was capable of profound forms of poetic expression. De Chirico’s paintings not only exemplified this, but also demonstrated the psychological potential that is unleashed when emotions evoked by loss are transferred to surrogate objects (Fig. 1). Magritte's realisation could well be unpacked along the lines that one can achieve catharsis through an act of ‘poetic’ painting or hypercathexis linked to virtual or real objects. Both of these strategies enabled Magritte to create a pictorial form of cathartic re-membering, or reliving, associated with his mother’s tragic death. Carl Jung refers to this as an act of abreaction. (Jung 1961)