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Giorgio de Chirico and the Metaphysical City: Nietzsche, Modernism, Paris. Ara H. Merjian. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014. Pp. xviii + 351. $75.00 (cloth).
If there is an image that prefigures the haunted landscape of European modernity-an image of all that would vanish in the century to come-it might be said to be Giorgio de Chirico's Mystery and Melancholy of a Street, painted on the eve of the First World War. As if already a spectral trace of her own disappearance, a little girl pushes a wheel across a shaft of sunlight at the border of an arcade-lined piazza. Near the center of the painting, the shadow of an unseen figure (a statue? a soldier?) intrudes on the scene, looming ominously over the girl's lonely pastime. A horse trailer in the foreground lies vacant. With its elongated shadows and oblique planes of regress, de Chirico's invocation of "mystery" and "melancholy" offers an allegory of twentiethcentury metaphysics, if not necessarily its geopolitical history: a familiar European landscape rendered alien through emptiness and loss.
Much has been written over the past century about such haunted architectural forms and spaces, yet the reception of de Chirico's work has often amounted to a sort of evacuation in its own right. Whereas their moody atmospherics have been celebrated (and absorbed) by countless other artists, the intellectual project of de Chirico's "metaphysical" painting has often remained obscure. As a result, the paintings' iconography now seems all too familiar, while de Chirico himself, especially in light of what many considered his subsequent lapse into self-plagiarism and reactionary classicism, has faded to little more than a footnote to his empty pictures. Even in the paintings themselves, we tend to favor the figural lexicon of perspectives and shadows over any discrete intellectual project.
Ara Merjian's rich, scrupulously researched, and beautifully written study of de Chirico's "metaphysical" paintings (as the artist called them) offers a bold reappraisal of this project. Approaching de Chirico's body of work from 1911-15 as philosophical in more than name alone, Merjian reassesses the early career of a figure whose adulation by the Parisian avant-garde during and after the First World War was matched in intensity only by his summary rejection a few years later. Born the same year as...