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

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Description: Cavalli e cavalieri
signed 'G.de Chirico' (lower right)
oil on canvas
19 3/4 x 27 1/4 in. (50.2 x 69.2 cm.)
Painted in 1934

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Provenance: The artist's studio.
Chester H. Johnson, by whom acquired from the above in 1957.

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Exhibited: Rome, Studio Palma, 1934, no. 107.
Chicago, Chester H. Johnson Gallery, June 1957.
Okasaki, Osaka, Kitakyushu, Les Maîtres du Surréalisme, July - November 1998, no. 58 (illustrated p. 69).
Bilbao, Bilbao Bizkaia Kutxa, Giorgio de Chirico, August - October 2001 (illustrated p. 71); this exhibition later travelled to Sabadell, Fundació Caixa de Sabadell.
Monaco, Marlborough Monaco Gallery, Art italien moderne et contemporain, October - November 2002 (illustrated p. 15).

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Published: The Italian News of Chicago, 16 June 1957.
C. Bruni Sakraischik, Catalogo Generale Giorgio de Chirico, Opere dal 1931 al 1950, vol. VIII, Milan, 1987, no. 685 (illustrated).

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Notes: 'When, in the sixteenth year of the reign of Antoninus the philosopher, Pausanias visited Greece, the gods had long been dead. The only voice that remained was that of the sea and the wind. The temples offered the sky their illustrious decay. The drums of columns were scattered on the ground like colossal broken necklaces. Wild horses ran on deserted beaches, they stopped to listen, moved around the crazy bloodshot eye, then raced off at a gallop, frightened by the immense nothingness' (A. Savinio, Narrate, uomini, la vostra storia (vita di Isadora Duncan), Milan, 1942, p. 258, quoted in P. Baldacci, Giorgio de Chirico Betraying the Muse: De Chirico and the Surrealists, New York, 1994, p. 170).

Written by Giorgio de Chirico's brother, the above quotation perfectly captures the atmosphere of Cavalli e cavalieri, painted in 1934. There is a haunting and timeless feeling to the painting, with the land around the creatures barren, as though time has laid waste to it all, the crumbling remains of ancient civilisation and ancient beliefs evoked by the tumbledown columns and the temple in the background.

De Chirico's paintings sought to produce a strange feeling of recognition and revelation in their viewers, and Cavalli e cavalieri achieves this through many techniques. Not least amongst these is the manner through which de Chirico presents the viewer with a seeming lack of logic, showing a scene in which order has crumbled and strange and beautiful wild horses have taken possession of the beach and of the realm itself, although the riders are attempting to master them. The horses on the beach became a recurring theme in de Chirico's art, seeming to represent some strange and fevered mindscape, but where galloping creatures dominate most of his paintings on the theme, Cavalli e cavalieri is marked by a monumental stillness, a quality that is rare in his depictions of the animal kingdom ruling amongst the ruins of man.

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