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Artist or Maker: Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978)

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Description: Interno metafisico con biscotti
signed 'g. de Chirico' (lower center); signed and titled 'Giorgio de Chirico, "Interno metafisico con biscotti"' (on the reverse)
oil on canvas
23 5/8 x 19 5/8in. (60 x 50cm.)
Painted in 1960

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Provenance: Acquired by the previous owner circa 1965.
Thence by descent to the present owner.

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Published: C. Bruni Sakraischik, Catalogo generale Giorgio de Chirico. Opere dal 1951 al 1974, vol. V, Milan, 1975-1987, no. 699 (illustrated).

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Notes: THE PROPERTY OF A PRIVATE SWISS COLLECTOR

Throughout his life de Chirico returned to the themes and subjects of his earliest metaphysical paintings on numerous occasions, revisiting, reworking and altering the forms of these earlier paintings so that his oeuvre itself grew into a strange metaphysical conglomeration of visions that existed beyond the logic of the time and place within which they were made. In denying the structure or validity of linear time by painting in this way - a way in which a chronological sense of development is ultimately rendered useless - de Chirico incorporated the mysterious anti-logic of his poetic and metaphysical visions of the world into the very nature of his life's work.

In this sense Metaphysical Interior with biscuits is both a reprise, an alternate or perhaps even a prelude to the Ferrarese painting from de Chirico's first Metaphysical period La rivolta del saggio (The Revolt of the Wise) of 1916 now housed in the Estorick Collection in London. Depicting a similar but also different metaphysical interior, the painting conveys the same poetic vision of constructed chaos and of the fundamental absurdity of logic.

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