De Chirico, Max Ernst, Magritte, Balthus
A Look into the Invisible

edited by Paolo Baldacci

exhibition catalogue: Florence, Palazzo Strozzi, 26 February–18 July 2010

From the beginning of his career, Giorgio de Chirico decided that his painting should “show what cannot be seen”, because there was no point in depicting the things that were already visible in nature.
Magritte, in fact, when he first encountered the painting of De Chirico in 1925, said it gave him the sensation of being able “to see thought”. Famous artists and poets such as Guillaume Apollinaire and André Breton, immediately recognized their own aesthetics in his estranged and enigmatic vision of the world and his extraordinarily lucid and penetrating representation of things.
This opened the way to all the movements that made European art so vital between World War I and World War II: Dada, Surrealism, Magic Realism and Neo-romanticism.
The catalogue includes some of the best known De Chirico paintings from his Metaphysical period (L’énigme de l’arrivée et de l’après-midi, La nostalgie de l’infini and La sérénité du savant, among others), Metaphysical paintings by Carrà (Il gentiluomo briaco, L’ovale delle apparizioni), still lifes by Morandi, masterpieces by René Magritte (such as La condition humaine, Le sens de la nuit and La clef des songes), Max Ernst (Oedipus Rex and Vision provoquée par l’aspect nocturne de la porte Saint-Denis, among others) and Balthus (Le passage du Commerce-Saint-André, Le café de l’Odéon) accompanied, in a dialogue of sorts, by significant works of Niklaus Stoecklin, Arturo Nathan, Pierre Roy and Alberto Savinio.