For the artist Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978), a founder of the metaphysical art movement, the year 1914 marked a momentous and pivotal time in his aesthetic production. He completed most of his well-known paintings of metaphysical cityscapes that year, just before the advent of World War I, while living in Paris. These paintings emerged within the context of the city's avant-garde circles, and they ultimately redirected the course of modernist painting. Ara H. Merjian's text considers the artist's representation of architectural space in relation to his sustained engagement with the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and addresses why the painter's 'Nietzschean method' takes architecture as its means and metaphor, a physical premise for metaphysical revelation.
Notes
"This book began as a dissertation at the University of California, Berkeley.... An abridged version of chapter four appeared in the journal Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, vol. 57/58 (spring-autumn 2010), while a few passages from chapter two appeared in an essay for California Italian Studies, January 2010"--Acknowledgements.
Bibliographic references
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Source of description
Description based on print record and online resource (A&AePortal, viewed on July 3, 2019).
Language note
Includes translations from the French and the Italian.
Contents
Introduction : the Nietzschean method
1. A pathos of distance : metaphysical perspective, 1912-1914
2. The city, squared : Gare Montparnasse
3. The prison-house of painting : the Enigma of Fatality
4. Untimely objects : The Evil Genius of a King
5. Ecce homo (Orthopedicus) : The Seer
Conclusions : urban untimely.
ISBN
9780300250770
0300250770
OCLC
1107321005
Doi
10.37862/aaeportal.00059
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