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37

Property from a European collection GIORGIO DE CHIRICO (1888-1978) Due Cavalli signed and dated

Currency:USD Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:900,000.00 - 1,200,000.00 USD
Property from a European collection GIORGIO DE CHIRICO (1888-1978) Due Cavalli signed and dated
Property from a
European collection
GIORGIO DE CHIRICO
(1888-1978)
Due Cavalli
signed and dated
"G. de Chirico 1926" (upper left)
oil on canvas
36 1/4 x 28 3/4 in. (92 x 73 cm)
painted in 1926
Estimate: $900,000-1,200,000 <p>Provenance
Galerie de l'Effort Moderne (Léonce Rosenberg), Paris (stock no. 894)
Georges Bernheim, Paris
Mrs. Quincy Abrams Shaw McKean, Boston (by 1938)
Acquired from the above by the present owner <p>Exhibited
Cambridge, Ma, Harvard University Art Museums, The Fogg Art Museum, The Horse: Its Significance in Art, April 30-May 21,1938, no. 17 (illustrated; as Chevaux au bord de la mer) <p>Literature
Nino Frank, "Giorgio de Chirico et Alberto Savinio," Cahiers
de Belgique, April 1929, no. 133
"Poèmes," Sélection, Cahiers Anvers 8, December 1929, no. 68
(as Chevaux dans la campagne)
Maurizio Fagiolo dell'Arco and Paolo Baldacci, eds., Giorgio
de Chirico: Parigi 1924-1929: dalla nascita del Surrealismo
al crollo di Wall Street, Milan, 1982, pp. 398 and 514, no. 121 (illustrated, in color, p. 399)
"Giorgio, who was born in Greece, no longer needs to paint Pegasus. A horse by the sea - with its color, its eyes and its mouth - assumes the importance of the myth" (Jean Cocteau, 1928, quoted in De Chirico and the Mediterranean, New York, 1998, p. 288). As one of the most inventive artists of the 20th century, De Chirico displayed his penchant for Greek mythology and the revival of classical forms in the mid 1920s with a series of Horses by the Sea, inspiring such praise from the modernist poet Jean Cocteau for their archetypal force. The artist would return to the motif in the ensuing decades, producing more canvases of horses in his lifetime than any other subject. Painted in 1926, the present work counts among the earliest of the equine series, distinctive for its soft brushwork, sculpted forms, and non-naturalistic color.
De Chirico returned to Paris in 1925 after his sojourn in Rome, fueled by a renewed passion in the theories of antiquity and old master techniques. Hailed as the precursor of the Surrealist movement, the artist enjoyed international success the following year. His new work, however, was summarily rejected by André Breton and other members of the group for seemingly betraying their cause. The celebrated metaphysical paintings of the previous decade were replaced with a more conservative and increasingly fanciful vision of gladiators and Dionysiac horses, depicted with greater plasticity and a soft feathery brush. Like many of his contemporaries, De Chirico responded to a distinctly postwar sensibility for a return to order with a romantic nostalgia for the past.
Emily Braun, however, describes the unsettling mixture of elements in De Chirico's horse paintings that elude a strictly conservative vision: "Already in his initial versions of Horses on the Beach, de Chirico exaggerated the manes and tails in luxuriant tresses, with an affectation redolent of the boudoir. Their anonymous facial features, their resemblence in consistency and color, to plastic toys, their situation in pastel landscapes of an oddly humid air - all conspire to give de Chirico's horse of the twenties a style entirely their own" (Emily Braun, "A New Vision of De Chirico," in Giorgio de Chirico and America, New York, 1996, p. 19).
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