History of Art: Paintings that Changed the World

Paintings

that Changed the World

(by Klaus Reichold & Bernhard Graf)

From Lascaux to Warhol

Supreme art is a traditional statement of certain heroic and religious truth,
passed on from age to age, modified by individual genius,
but never abandoned.

William Butler Yeats

The Power of Nature

In the shadow of Mont Sainte-Victoire

On the afternoon of 15 October 1906, the clouds had finally lifted after a thunder storm lasting many hours. A broad beam of light illuminated the rising ground between the Chemin des Lauves and the rugged Mont Sainte-Victoire Range. The country road was deserted. Only a horse-drawn cart was trundling on its way to Aix-en-Provence. Suddenly it was forced to a halt: a dark figure with dirty, wet clothing lay across the road: Pere Cezanne.

Kurt Leonhard, Cezanne, 1966

Paul Cezanne, Still Life with Apples and Oranges

He was not dead but unconscious. The two men eventually managed to hoist him up on to their cart and take him to his residence in town, where they left him in the care of his landlady, Mme Bremond. The first thing he is said to have asked on regaining consciousness was whether the sun was shining again. He wanted to go back out of doors to finish the painting he was working on when it had started to rain. However, the artist was never able to finish it. Paul Cezanne, in his youth a friend of Emile Zola's, died seven days later. All his life he had been regarded as sickly: "Without painting he would have been nothing but a shy, introspective psychopath incapable of living a normal life — this is the image his family and the people of Aix seem to have had of him", thus one of Cezanne's many biographers. Some of the painter's eccentricities have been recorded and range from nervous irritability and a phobia of physical contact, to paranoia. Cezanne went through phases of deep depression followed by manic periods during which he grandly over-estimated himself and his abilities. Then he would write about his celebrated former colleagues in Paris, such as Manet or Renoir: "Compared to me, all my compatriots are idiots". Painting was the only thing that kept the unpredictable Provencal, whose world was as unsteady as a damaged ship floundering in heavy seas, on a fairly even keel.

Cezanne preferred to paint out of doors. However, because he could not bear having anyone look over his shoulder while he was painting, he fled town and sought the solitude of nature in the surrounding countryside. Cezanne was obsessed with Mont Sainte-Victoire. He drew and painted more than sixty versions of this massive limestone escarpment, which looms a thousand metres above the flat country fifteen kilometres east of Aix. Here, he was alone and could forget all his troubles with the municipal authorities, who, he felt, had ruined the city with pavements, hideous promenades and gas lights. A further advantage of the mountains was that they were serenely static. Always squabbling with someone about something when he was not painting, Cezanne concentrated so hard on his still lifes that the fruit was invariably rotten before he had finished. It once took him 115 sittings to complete a portrait and he was known to have burst into a terrible rage at sitters who altered their expression. It was ideal for him that the face of Mont Sainte-Victoire only changed with the varying light and the seasons of the year. The "Sacred Mountain of Provence", as Mont Sainte-Victoire is sometimes called, became the leitmotif of Cezanne's work. Under its shadow began and ended the life of a painter who hardly exchanged a word with others, yet stirred the world with his groundbreaking pictorial language.

Paul Cezanne
(1839-1906)
Mont Sainte-Victoire

I Couldn't Care Less!

Another Eden in the South Seas

The people of Tahiti have invented a word: "No artu", which means "I couldn't care less!" Here it means pretty much the same as complete serenity and naturalness. You cannot imagine how I have grown accustomed to this word. I often say it -and I understand it.

Paul Gauguin, Letter to Georges Daniel de Monfroid, 7 November 1891

Coconut palms, pristine white beaches, crystal-clear azure waters, natives leading modest but happy lives in peace and harmony and colourful tribal festivities. In the early twentieth century a great many people in the Old World dreamt of the South Seas. Burgeoning industrialisation and increasing traffic were beginning to infringe on the peace of the cities and the countryside alike, creating unnecessary stress and a hectic way of life. The sparsely populated islands dotting the Tropic of Capricorn were viewed as a veritable paradise in comparison. There, weary Europeans thought they might find the unspoilt natural beauty of the Garden of Eden and a people living in serene harmony in such an earthly paradise. That at least was Paul Gauguin's vision.

The Frenchman had spent several years at sea before embarking on a brilliant career as a stockbroker. At the age of thirty-four he decided to give up everything thinking, mistakenly as it turned out, that he could live from his painting. His circumstances grew increasingly difficult. He first moved to Rouen, then to Brittany, before settling in Aries with Vincent Van Gogh, only to return to Brittany shortly afterwards. His nomadic life inspired creativity, but led to a destitute existence, ultimately causing an irreparable rift between him and his family. Finally, he abandoned his wife and children. The prospect of leaving everything far behind may have sparked his love of adventure, for soon he was on his way to Tahiti: "The future will belong to the painters of the tropics because no one has yet painted them, and we always need novelties for the general public, the stupid purchasers of art." On 8 July 1891 Gauguin arrived at Papeete, the capital of the Tahitian Islands. However, the paradise of "noble savages", which he had thought might be free of the temptations, vices and defects of European life, turned out to be a delusion. The light, the lush vegetation and natural beauty, the exotic customs and friendliness of the natives did not disappoint him. Daily life, on the other hand, was rife with the corruption and oppression that accompanied French colonial rule, leaving a grey veil over the brilliant colours of his South Seas Arcadia. Gauguin married a Tahitian, settled down in a typical Tahitian house and was soon in conflict with the French colonial authorities. Beset by ill health and chronic poverty, he was forced to return to Pans in 1893. Two years later he fled to the South Seas again, first to Tahiti and then to the Marquesas Islands, where he died in 1903 in a hut he had decorated with his paintings. Although his dreams of paradise had not been fulfilled, Gauguin painted powerful pictures full of joy and serenity while in the South Seas. In one of his letters he declared: "Life is so delightful here and my work so salutary that it would be madness to seek this anywhere else."

Paul Gauguin
(1848—1903)
Where are we? Who are we? Where are we going?
1897
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Freezing Every Gesture

Light and effects

I speak of the past, for it seems to me that everything is growing older in me - except my heart. And even my heart has something artificial about it. The dancers have sewn it into a pink silk sachet, slightly faded pink silk, like their ballet slippers.

Edgar Degas, letter to the sculptor Albert Bartholome, 17 January 1886

Built between 1862 and 1865 near the Madeleine, the Paris Opera — then, the world's largest opera house — covers an area of 11,000 square metres. Behind an exuberant facade, decorated with allegorical figures, the auditorium seats 2,200. The artist Edgar Degas, who lived three streets away near rue Le Peletier, did not require a season ticket. By the 1860s, this witty and entertaining painter, who could also be stubbornly intransigent when he so desired, had discovered ballet as his genre. Because he knew several members of the orchestra, he had access to the sacrosanct world backstage. Nearly every day the Frenchman sat on or behind the stage. Early on he had become interested in motifs drawn from urban life, painting workaday scenes of women ironing, passers-by in the streets and men in bars, as well as the pleasures of the Parisian racecourse or circus scenes. However, Degas, who was the son of an aristocratic banker of Italian descent and a New Orleans Creole, found artistes and prostitutes common but intriguing. What the Moulin Rouge was to Toulouse-Lautrec, the rehearsal room with its ballerinas was to Degas.

In those days the Pans Opera Ballet — not to mention more illustrious names — was waning in the firmament of the Parisian cultural scene. Choreographers were running out of ideas and the public was not satisfied with what the Opera Ballet had to offer. But the quality of the productions was of no consequence to Degas, who was concerned with movement, speed and the enchantment of ballet. In his paintings, he captured the elegance and delicate grace of ballet with an unprecedented keenness of observation. Tragically, by 1870, his eyesight was beginning to fail. As if to record as much as he could on canvas before it was too late, Degas painted ever more feverishly to freeze every gesture, every pose of his ballerinas: dancing on points, performing pas de deux or taking their curtain call, their tutus a froth of effervescence. He was even more fascinated by what went on behind the scenes. The pictures in which he captured ballerinas pulling up their tights, or fiddling with the laces of their slippers, are like snapshots taken by a hidden camera. He was not above depicting the darker side of dancing: ballerinas at the bar rubbing their ankles because they hurt or resting their heads on their arms in sheer exhaustion. Degas knew how to make even such moments of weariness enchanting. He introduced yet another first to painting: the effects of modern lighting. He was the first painter to study and exploit the effects of the mixture of natural and artificial light, like that of the setting sun and gas lanterns. The result was a painted twilight as it had never been seen before.

Edgar Degas
(1834—1917)
Behind the Scenes
1898

A New World Stage

Fin-de-siecle in Vienna

I love those first timid caresses,
half questioning, yet already
     half trusting,
they crackle with red sparks
     of seduction
and shoot sheaves of gold
     into the fiery night.

Stefan Zweig, from Silver Strings, 1901

In 1900 Vienna was the glittering hub of the

Austro-Hungarian Empire and the world capital of Fin-de-siecle culture. Tradition reigned supreme in the city of waltzes and coffeehouses. Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, the immortal three in music, had lived here. Since the Habsburgs had made it their capital centuries before, all the currents of European culture and civilisation converged in Vienna. A harmony of contrasts, ''It was lovely to live here", wrote Stefan Zweig, "for, unconsciously, every person in the city became a sophisticate, a cosmopolitan". The charm of turn-of-the-century Vienna worked its magic on poets and authors, musicians and artists; the city was full of famous faces such as Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Arnold Schonberg and Gustav Mahler, who all adored it. Yet, an era was drawing to a close, overshadowed by the decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Still elegant, the boulevards of Vienna were growing shabby. The clouds of war were gathering on the horizon. The flower of Viennese Jugendstil was in late bloom and the golden age was fading.

Gustav Klimt was regarded as the leading Viennese painter of his day. A goldsmith's son, he founded the "Vienna Secession" in defiance of academic painting. As eclectic as the city itself, Klimt's aesthetic embraced such superficially disparate elements as jin-ie-swclt elegance and sensuousness and Byzantine icons and mosaics. Moreover, he incorporated elements of East Asian and ancient Egyptian art in his work. He lavishly bestowed symbolic ornament and decoration on his works, making the surfaces of his pictures glitter with the colours of jewels — cornflower sapphires and amethysts, alexandntes and pearls on a rich gold ground.

Influenced by the writings of his fellow Viennese, Sigmund Freud, Klimt painted sensuous and sumptuous pictures, which aroused the ire of the critics. His work was condemned as "obscene", yet, all he did was revel in luxury and beauty with a suggestion of the physical pleasures in life, freed from the constraints of nineteenth-century inhibitions. His masterpiece, The Kiss, is a celebration of beauty and eroticism. Some might view it as a manifesto of decadence. In retrospect, Klimt's oeuvre seems to reflect one of the last dreams of innocence before the horrors of war set in.

Gustav Klimt
(1862—1918)
The Kiss
1907

Hewn with an Axe

Delight in distortion

You remember, don't you, that the picture was at first called The Brothel at Avignon. And do you know why? Avignon is a name that is linked to my life in Barcelona. There I lived only a few steps away from the Calle d'Avignon. That is where I always used to buy my paper and paints under the gaze of prostitutes.

Pablo Picasso, Word and Confessions, 1954

The newborn baby was blue and made no sound. The midwife thought it was dead, but not Don Salvador, both its uncle and doctor, who was reading his newspaper in the next room. He had the presence of mind to blow a whiff of cigar smoke into the face of the nearly suffocated baby. It began to draw in breaths of air and to scream. Thus Pablo Picasso encountered and conquered death in the first moments of his Ions life. What would there be left for him to fear? The world admired his impressive vitality, his passion for sheer hard work and the overwhelming self-confidence displayed by the brilliant artist, who had exhibited his first picture by the time he was fourteen. Picasso, who lived to be nearly ninety-two, was celebrated for his talent all his life. At the age of eighteen in Barcelona, he used to meet the city's intellectual avant-garde in the "The Four Cats", an artists' cafe. The youngest of the artists who frequented the cafe, he was soon the most popular: "He exerted such a powerful charisma that he became the leader of the entire group", related a contemporary.

In 1904 Picasso moved to Pans. He is said to have burned drawings to keep the stove ablaze — and to have painted the walls of his empty room with furniture. All this may be the stuff of legends, but it does reflect the conditions in which he lived at that time. Because he had broken with academic convention, preferring instead to paint the down-and-out, clowns and prostitutes, he had to struggle to earn his livelihood in his youth. Even among friends his work remained controversial. The biggest scandal caused by the young firebrand erupted over the painting entitled Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Not long before its completion, he had visited Henri Matisse and, in his flat, had picked up the first African sculpture he had ever seen. "He didn't put it down all evening. And when I arrived at his studio the next morning, the floor was covered with sheets of paper. They all bore the same motif: the head of a black woman. The same woman then emerged on his canvases; sometimes there were two of them, sometimes three. Suddenly there was Les Demoiselles A'Avignon, a picture as big as a wall", recalls the poet Max Jacob.

The writers and artists of the nineteenth century had depicted distant lands as being like paradise, exotically transfiguring and glamourising reality. Picasso, on the other hand, was interested solely in the aesthetics of exoticism. His defiance of convention in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, which was decried as being "aggressively erotic", set off shock waves. Contemporaries thought the figures' faces looked "as if they had been hewn with an axe". Construed as the artists homage to the shrill world of deformation and deconstructed myth, it was widely interpreted as a general attack on the ideals of European art. In retrospect, however, this picture, with its synchronicity of different perspectives, represents the beginning of a new era for painting — a break with the past and a challenge for the future.

Pablo Picasso
(1881—1973)
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
1907

The Calming Effect of Colour

The blue of the Cote d'Azur

What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or disturbing subject matter... like a comforting influence, mental relief-something like a good armchair in which one rests from physical fatigue.

Henri Matisse, A Painter's Notes, 1908

BRASSAI: Matisse and his model, 1939

The French artist Henri Matisse delighted in painting the blue of his beloved Cote d'Azur, the green umbrella pines and the rows of elegant white villas lining the coast. He revelled in capturing the essence of leisurely life on canvas: men playing boules in the shade of the trees, people relaxing and enjoying quiet, carefree days in the sun, yachts bobbmg on a gentle swellin the harbour accompanied by the balmy breezes of the mistral. Colours, for him, were like the harmony of music. He was convinced that contemplating sunlit colours induced profound inner calm. In Dance he explores the calming effect of colour. This is not the only occasion on which he consciously acted as a painterly pastor, a priest of the easel, who exuded an almost religious feeling for life. In 1908 he expressed the hope that people might find peace and tranquillity in his paintings. He loved life's sensuous pleasures, the beauty of the models who sat for him and the lushness of nature. Painting was his way of sharing his own zest for life with others from all walks of life. He certainly succeeded. The Italian painter Renato Guttuso called Matisse's work a "feast for the senses" and "a design for a paradise-like world". With the joyous serenity depicted in his paintings, Matisse superbly "exemplified a love of life and trust in its beauty". The French writer Louis Aragon, like Matisse a member of the French Communist Party, raved about the artists work. His paintings showed "the victorious smile of our times, since mankind has begun to turn away from darkness and, with just this smile, triumphantly confronts the days that are for ever bright and peaceful". In Matisse's paintings the sun is almost always shining and the people he portrays appear carefree. The lightness of being also imbues the five men and women suspended in dreamy abandon between heaven and earth in Dance. Later, Matisse designed sets and costumes for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in Paris, for he also loved ballet. Dance represented life and rhythm, sparkling with vitality and the freshness of youth. In 1905 Matisse is said to have watched Catalan fishermen dancing the Sardana, an old round dance with abrupt changes of beat and tempo, on the beach at Collioure. Perhaps the memory of this scene is lent expression in Dance. Although Matisse frequented the Paris cafe, Moulin de la Galette, where people danced on Sunday afternoons, he was not sufficiently inspired by the ambience there to paint it. What most likely captured his imagination at the Paris cafe were the intriguing steps of the farandole, an ancient Provencal dance, whose insistent rhythms seem to have underscored his painting.

Henri Matisse
(1869-1954)
Dance
1909

Blue Horses and Yellow Cows

Munich in 1911: The art capital

The Blue Rider is here - a lovely sentence, five words -nothing but stars. I'm now thinking like the moon. Am dwelling in the clouds, especially in the evenings when no one else is in the streets.... My eyes hurt as if your sweet horse had kicked up a cloud of dust. Come to me, you and your spouse, Blue Rider, that I may love you.

The lyric poet Else Lasker-Schuler in a letter to Franz Marc, 9 December 1912

Vasily Kandinsky, final design for the cover of the Blue Rider almanac, 1911

In 1911 a full tankard of beer in the Bavarian royal capital of Munich cost 30 pfennigs. In those days the city on the bar boasted cultural attractions on a scale that dwarfed the "Oktober Fest". Thomas Mann was writing Death in Venice in his flat in Schwabmg, the artistic and cultural hub of Munich. Bruno Walter was conducting the world premiere of Gustav Mahler's Songs of the Earth at the Conservatory. Munich gleamed as the centre of the arts. As the lyric poet Else Lasker-Schuler remarked:

"Munich is like paradise.... Listening to friends playing the accordion; strolling past the windows of the reverent old stores; old masters, tasteful jewellery, wild weapons from the tombs of biblical potentates, and everywhere the blue eyes of King Ludwig!... One can muse so effortlessly in Munich, and recline in comfort on well-upholstered memories. Here it feels good to be oneself."

However, even the disgruntled Munich of conventional wisdom found plenty to jolt it out of its stolidity. A performance staged by the nude dancer Via-Villany made the chamois tufts that Bavarian men wear on their loden hats wag with indignation. In a former shop in Tuerken Strasse two men could be seen through the window painting decidedly offensive pictures. One of them, Franz Marc, was defiantly brandishing the picture of a horse — painted blue! Loud protests were heard. The police who rushed to the scene had no legal right to make the painters stop what they were doing so they contented themselves with patrolling the area around the shop to keep public wrath from erupting. Marc and his colleague Vasily Kandinsky were committed to encouraging a dialogue between painting, literature and music with the purpose of "radically widening the bounds of expressive creativity". In 1912 they published an almanac that caused a sensation. It contained nineteen articles and quoted passages, three musical scores and 141 reproductions of pictures, including folk art and children's paintings and drawings, "primitive, Roman and Gothic art", "twentieth-century art" and Egyptian shadow-play figures. By bringing together this jumbled mixture of artworks they hoped to encourage other artists to venture in new directions. The almanac bore the title "Blauer Reiter" (Blue Rider). "We thought up the name round the coffee table in the shade of Marc's garden", Kandinsky said, adding: "We both loved blue, Marc — horses, and I — riders. The name came of its own accord". Soon afterwards, the Blue Rider had their first exhibition. Never tightly organised, the group consisted of a circle of artists around Marc and Kandinsky. Marc found animals "purer" than human beings. In his work, blue stood for masculinity, astrmgency and intellect. The horse was the attribute of the popular saints Martin and George, who as celestial riders conquered evil and materialism. Marc and Kandinsky contrived to emulate them in art. The Blue Rider did not last long; it dissolved in 1916 after Franz Marc was killed in action at Verdun.

Franz Marc
(1880—1916)
Blue Horse I
1911

Painting Music

From the visible world to an abstract symphony of colours

The sun is melting Moscow down to a mere speck which, like a tuba gone mad, is making the whole inner being, the whole soul vibrate.... It is only the final chord of the symphony that heightens colours to their most vivid.... Pink, purple, yellow, white, pistachio-green, flaming red houses, churches - each a song unto itself - the shrill green lawn, the deep drone of the trees.... Painting this hour, I thought, would represent the artist's most unlikely and loftiest happiness.

Wassily Kandinsky, 1912, in Collected Writings 1,1980

The colours of Moscow: St Basil's Cathedral on Reel Square

One evening in 1910 Vasily Kandinsky entered his Munich studio, noticed a canvas that had been accidentally hung upside down and was enraptured. He had suddenly comprehended that this was a picture "of extraordinary beauty, glowing with an inner radiance". At that time, as the Russian emigre would say later, he had, in a flash of insight, understood what abstraction really meant. In connection with art, "abstraction" did not mean "anything that could be perceived by the senses; it meant trying to represent the intellectual content of something".This did not mean depicting a couple embracing, for instance, but instead expressing their feelings of joy, love and security solely by means of a non-representational approach.

The discussion waxed loud and long as to who had been the first to paint an abstract picture and who should therefore be regarded as the founder of abstract painting. All his life, Kandinsky would remain convinced that the honour should have gone to him. Today it is a well-known fact that other artists, such as Hans Schmithals, painted abstract pictures before Kandinsky did. Nevertheless, Kandinsky deserves full credit for the pioneering way he allowed colour and form to become autonomous in his compositions.

Kandinsky had refused a university chair in law to become a painter. His progress towards abstraction was long and arduous. At the beginning of his artistic career, any type of painting that did not correspond to reality left him bewildered. At the age of thirty he saw an exhibition of French Impressionists in Moscow and stood for hours before Monet's Haystack, jotting down notes: "It was only when I read the catalogue that I realised it was a haystack. I couldn't pick it out. I was embarrassed about not being able to do so. I also felt that the painter had no right to paint so indistinctly. I numbly sensed that the real subject of the painting was missing." Then Kandinsky became more familiar with the painting and noted happily "that the picture not only seizes one, it imprints itself indelibly on one's memory to hover, always unexpectedly, before one's eyes in all its detail.... Painting has assumed magic-al power and magnificence. Unconsciously, however, the subject has been discredited as an unavoidable element of the picture. I had the general impression that a tiny particle of my sundrenched fairy-tale Moscow already had an existence of its own on canvas." Despite his allegiance to abstraction, Kandinsky drew his inspiration solely from the visible world, starting with carvings on Russian peasants' houses and extending to African masks and Upper Bavarian votive tablets. It was not his aim to represent nothingness with his abstract renderings; he endeavoured to reveal the primal chaos from which the creative force emerged, the force that once formed the world. Composition Vll, Kandinsky's most important work from the period before the First World War, does not attest to destruction, but carries the message of a creative beginning.

Vasily Kandinsky
(1866-1944)
Composicion VI

Down the Garden Path

Water-lilies at Giverny

When the water-lilies in the garden carry us from the surface of the water to the wandering clouds of infinite space, we take leave of the earth - and even its heavens - to enjoy the highest harmony of things, which lies beyond our little planet.

Georges Clemenceau, Claude Monet, 1929

The former French president and statesman Georges Clemenceau described one of the water-lily pictures painted by his friend Claude Monet as "a water-meadow covered with flowers and leaves, ignited by the torch of the sun and glittering in the play of light between the sky and the surface of the water". Clemenceau had successfully coordinated French political and military efforts towards the end of the First World War and made a major contribution to the Allied victory. He raved about Monet's water-lily pictures calling them a "revelation". Between 1915 and 1924 he made it possible for Monet to paint eight enormous water-lily murals on the walls of the Orangerie in the Tuileries as a gift to the nation. Despite such encouragement, however, Claude Monet was not surrounded by distinguished promoters and patrons from the outset. On the contrary, his work entitled Impression, soleil levant inspired the critic Louis Leroy to coin the derogatory term "Impressionists" for an entire group of painters whose work he did not like. For decades Monet was almost destitute. Not until art dealer Theo van Gogh, Vincent's brother, managed to sell one of his paintings for 10,350 Francs — then an almost unheard of price for a work of contemporary art — was Claude Monet able to live fairly comfortably. Already middle-aged, he began to reap the fruits of his success.

Monet was even able to make a life-long dream come true. For seven years he had rented a country house in Giverny; now he was able to buy it and lay out a garden of flowers and shrubs. In 1895 and 1896 he successfully negotiated the purchase of several neighbouring plots of land — including a pond — which he planted with a profusion of weeping willows, irises, rhododendrons and water-lilies. An avid landscape gardener, he was inspired by Japanese woodcuts, which were by now sought after on the European art market, especially in France and England. Monet was so fond of his estate that his chief preoccupation for the remaining thirty-six years of his life was painting views of his gardens. As a young man he had always painted out of doors to capture the light and atmosphere and the interplay of colour and reflection. The six gardeners Monet employed in old age took care of his paradise, leaving him free to paint it and touch up the paintings in his studio. Water-lilies were his obsession: between 1903 and 1908 he painted forty-eight pictures of them, which he exhibited in Paris in 1909. He sought eternity in painting, or so his fleeting glimpse of it would seem to intimate.

Claude Monet
(1840—1926)
Water-Lilies

Spectres Are Born

Giorgio de Chirico and World War I

I for my part believe that a place that paralyzes and freezes the brightness of noonday hides more secrets than a dark room in which someone is holding a seance.

Giorgio de Chirico, in a letter to a friend, January 1919

Giorgio de Chirico
Self-Portrait, 1924

A possible source of inspiration? The arcades bordering the palace
gardens in Munich where Giorgio de Chirico studied between 1906-09

Seldom had spring brought forth more flowers than in 1914: the days were blue and soft and the air balmy. Inhabitants of the European capitals enjoyed the coffeehouses and parks. At seaside resorts crowds danced under chestnut trees to the strains of promenade concerts. And in their offices the diplomats were calculating and worrying. In the Balkans the vital interests of the Austrian, Russian and Turkish Empires were balanced: but it was an unstable balance and many nationalists were convinced that their nation would benefit from its overthrow. When the Austrian Archduke was assassinated in Sarajevo by a Slav nationalist the Austrian government calculated that it was then or never for their interests in the Balkans. Encouraged by their German allies, who believed that a war with the French was nearly inevitable and that Germany's chances were better in 1914 than they would be in 1918, the Austrians issued the Serbs a humiliating ultimatum. But the Russians had appointed themselves the protectors of the Serbs and were closely allied to the French. No one knew how seriously the British took their alliance to the French....

The pressure rose slowly at first, but then rapidly. The levy of a war tax on one side was answered with the lengthening of the term of military service on the other; partial mobilization on one side was answered on the other by full mobilization. The German commanders were convinced that to prevail against France and Russia they would have to destroy France quickly before the slow Russians could assemble their armies. But that meant they had to strike first: they could not allow the Russians to mobilise. Human will seemed powerless in the face of unfolding events, long-determined plans, strategic necessities, the requirements of national prestige — for the most terrifying thing about this, the most bloody war Europe had ever known, was that no one had wanted it.

In Paris the twenty-six-year-old painter Giorgio de Chirico was filled with the sense of the meaninglessness and madness of life.

The son of an Italian railway engineer, he was born in Greece and grew up familiar with ancient legends, with myth, tragedy and a strong sense of fate. He believed in signs and in predestination, magical places and the astrology and studied ancient Greek religion. He was also a student of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer.

De Chirico's feelings about the senselessness and terror of his time were worked through these symbols and ideas. He was one of the most truly "disturbing" of modern painters. De Chirico conjures up menacing Italian piazzas which seem to conceal the key to a looming catastrophe. His colonnade-lmed facades seem to be the surface of an isolated world; to reflect the hot light of a shuttered noon. The purpose of his "Metaphysical Painting" was to reveal invisible forces, fears, emotions and shadows concealed behind the world of visible things. He played with allusions and like the ancients delighted in riddles and enigmas, such as the Sphinx, the oracle at Delphi and the Sybilline Books. What is the significance of the painting of 1914, Mystery and Melancholy of a Street? Could it signify anonymity, the solitude and menace of a great city? The work seems to evoke a mood which many of us have sensed before, of doom and evil, and of the senseless and unavoidable, bearing down on us. It is difficult for us not to see the work as a prophecy of what at the time was called "The Great War".

Giorgio de Chirico
(1888—1978)
Mystery and Melancholy of a Street
1914