Giorgio de Chirico

The first time that I saw this I painting by Giorgio de Chirico the first thing for me that I thought was seeing the two men shaking hands, my immediate thought was that of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here album cover of the two businessmen also shaking hands, though one is actually on fire, the reasoning of this as stated by Thorgerson

“People often shy away from emotional commitment for fear of rejection. Absent through fear of being hurt, of being ‘burnt’” (1997, p88)

Obviously this is not the case in Chirico’s painting, these are two people, perhaps friends meeting in a square, however one could argue that maybe Storm thorgerson has seen this painting and had been influenced, wittingly or not. I have, from looking at Chirico work online, obviously not originals, but copies of copies, see John Berger blog for more on that, but I have come to really enjoy these; one element is the re-emergence of the two figures shaking hands or standing next to each other with long shadows, this comes across as almost a signature motif, though not used extensively through his whole work. In contrast to the 35mm transparency that the album cover was shot on and giving it its light tones, de Chirico uses very strong colours, reds, oranges and greys turning to almost black in the shadows. His paintings and this one in particular, can be split up into the rule of thirds or golden thirds, if overlaid possibly even fitting into the rule of the Phi Spiral, in this case the inner most spiral finishing on the two figures. The composition leads the eye in both directions, if reading like a book from left to right one could follow the shadows from the fountain diagonally right to the figures, across the back and finishing down the arched building on the left, however if looking left to right the eye follows a slightly different track and lead up the building with the arches to the grey building at the back and then down to the figures finally resting on the fountain. Regarding the men in this painting you could assume that the two figures, instead of meeting are in fact departing company, denoted by the train top right, when we think of a train, it is always going somewhere as opposed to coming in from somewhere. The tapering sky, darkening quickly, again a recurring theme, lends depth as does the perspective of the train.

One other painting of de Chirico that most adolescents and adults alike maybe familiar with, is that of ‘Melancholy and Mystery of a Street’, used as a cover image for Philip Pullman's ‘The Subtle Knife’, part of His Dark Materials trilogy.