In this video, join essayist and New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik in an exploration of two masterpieces from the early twentieth century: Georgio De Chirico’s “Il Pomeriggio di Arianna (Ariadne’s Afternoon)”and Man Ray’s “Black Widow (Nativity).” Both painted near the outset of the first world war, these works not only capture the effusive zeitgeist of their age but prefigure the aesthetic movements that would come to characterize modern art.
Making their auction debut, “Il Pomeriggio di Arianna (Ariadne’s Afternoon)”and “Black Widow (Nativity)”will be offered as highlights of Sotheby’s Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale in New York. (28 October | New York) Learn more: https://www.sothebys.com/en/series/to…
subsequently backed by the art dealer Paul Guillaume – and the Parisian cultural and literary circles will be highlighted as never before.
The exhibition thus comes into its own at the Musée de l’Orangerie alongside the figure of Paul Guillaume, the first art dealer to work with Giorgio de Chirico. On his return to Italy in 1915, he and his brother Savinio were sent to Ferrare for military reasons, where he continued his artistic research. This period (June 1915-December 1918) provided an opportunity for painters Carlo Carrà and Giorgio Morandi to get to know the two brothers, thus resulting in the creation of what was later to be known as the “metaphysical movement” which brings the exhibition to a close.
“Everywhere is the wait and the gathering,” concludes “Resort.” A kind of soporific haze has seeped into de Chirico’s imagination, asserted through evocations of sleeping and dreaming. Even the violence and ambiguous sexual imagery of “The Mysterious Night” yield to a final note of definitive somnolence: “Everything sleeps; even the owls and the bats who also in the dream dream of sleeping.”
He daydreams of Mexico or Alaska and invokes a future-oriented “avant-city” and a distant day where he is immortalized, albeit in an old-fashioned mode as a “man of marble.”
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