Giorgio de Chirico

Giorgio de Chirico was born to Italian parents in Vólos in Greece on July 10, 1888. In 1900 he studied at the Polytechnic Institute of Athens and attended evening courses in life drawing. Around 1906 he moved to Munich, where he attended the Akademie der Bildenden Künste. In this period he became interested in the art of Arnold Böcklin and Max Klinger, in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer. He goes to Milan in 1909, to Florence in 1910 and to Paris in 1911, where he participates in the Salon d'Automne of 1912 and 1913 and in the Salon des Indépendants of 1913 and 1914. He regularly attends the weekly meetings of Guillaume Apollinaire where he meets Constantin Brancusi, André Derain, Max Jacob and others.
Due to the war he returned to Italy in 1915, where he met Filippo de Pisis in 1916 and Carlo Carrà in 1917; together they form the group which will later be called the Metaphysical School. In 1918 he moved to Rome where the Bragaglia Art House organized his first solo show in the winter of 1918-19. In this period he was among the leading exponents of the Valori Plastici group with which he exhibited at the Nationalgalerie in Berlin. From 1920 to 1924 he divided his time between Rome and Florence. In 1921, the Milan Art Gallery set up a personal one. In 1924 he participated for the first time in the Venice Biennale.
In 1925 he returned to Paris where he exhibited at Léonce Rosemberg's Galerie l'Effort Moderne. Also in Paris, his works were exhibited at the Galerie Paul Guillaume in 1926 and 1927 and at the Galerie Jeanne Bucher in 1927. In 1928, the Arthur Tooth Gallery in London and the Valentine Gallery in New York set up his solo shows. In 1929 he designed the sets and costumes for Le Bal, a ballet produced by Sergei Diaghilev, and at the same time his book Hebdomeros was published. In the following years he elaborated drawings for ballet and opera and continued to exhibit in Europe, the United States, Canada and Japan. In 1945 the first part of the volume Memories of my life was published. He died in Rome on November 20, 1978.