 The Village Marc Chagall |
Since the external world could no longer be trusted there was only one place to turn... inward, but not for some universal transcendental truth, but for an artistic truth.
"The artist should paint not only what he sees before him, but also what he sees within him..." Casper David Friedrich
The fascination with the irrational goes back at least to the Romantics and their search for a a universal truth beyond the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightments preoccupation with the material world.
 Melancholy and Mystery of a Street by Giorgio de Chirico.. 1914 |
"I had just come out of a long and painful intestinal illness and I was in a morbid state of sensitivity. The whole world, down to the marble of the buildings and the fountains, seemed to me to be convalescent. In the middle of the square rises a statue of Dante draped in a long cloak. The autumn sun, warm and unloving, lit the statue and the church facade. Then I had the strange impression that I was looking at these things for the first time." wrote De Chirico in 1911.
His reality had changed and for the next seven years he would paint his "convalescent world". A strange world of Cubist space suffused with mystery, melancholy and fear.
 Dance, Monster to my Soft Song by Paul Klee... 1922 |
"Formerly we used to represent things visible on earth," he wrote in 1920," things we either liked to look at or world have liked to see.
Today we reveal the reality that is behind visible things, thus expressing the belief that the visible world is merely an isolated case in relation to the universe and that there are many more other, latent realities..." His paintings and drawings are a search for the symbols and metaphors that would make this belief visible.
The toylike character of his fantasies are a result of his fascination with children's art and their polymorphous freedom to create signs and symbols unfettered by the dominates of society.
A return to the Romantic concept of man as intrinsically good in his natural state, uncorrupted by society and some how closer to the universal truth.
Lynn University Art Appreciation
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