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

The surrealist artist Giorgio de Chirico famously said that art should reveal what 'cannot be seen' in nature and ‘illuminate’ the mind’s eye.

A Look into the Invisible, on show at Florence's Palazzo Strozzi until 18 July 2010, centres around De Chirico’s metaphysical period; that shift in perspective between 1909-1910 when his sunlit Mediterranean cityscapes slowly became enigmatic and existential images of solitariness and bewilderment. The show explores the artist's own work, his influence on figures such as Max Ernst and Rene Magritte and the way his work paved the way for what came after, from Dadaism and Surrealism to Magic Realism and Neo-Romanticism.

Highlights of the exhibition include De Chirico’s revolutionary works, The Enigma of the Arrival and the Afternoon (1911-12) and The Nostalgia of the Infinite (1912), which portray his interest in the nihilistic literature of Nietzche, Schopenhauer and Heraclitus. As well as Oedipus Rex (1922), the exhibition features some of Max Ernst’s first collages and drawings which highlight the interesting affinities they share with De Chirico’s metaphysical works. Magritte’s The Key of Dreams (1930) and The Human Condition (1933), Carlo Carrà’s The Drunken Gentleman (1916) and Giorgio Morandi’s still lifes similarly show themes of poetic interiority and disquieting melancholy.

The French painter Balthus is the more surprising of De Chirico’s disciples, but the justification of his inclusion can be found in a deeper consideration of the monumental Passage du Commerce-Saint-Andre (1952-1954) and the Place de L’Odeon (1928), works in which Balthus uses sexuality to break out of the condition of existential solitude, bringing a new and vital intensity to the 'world of silence'.