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

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Description: Ettore
signed 'G. de Chirico 1916' (lower right)
oil on canvas
28 1/8 x 20in. (71.5 x 50.8cm.)
Painted in the 1930s

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Provenance: Dr Antonio Mazzotta, Milan, by whom acquired directly from the artist. Acquired by the present owner circa 1973.

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Exhibited: Warsaw, Galeria Zacheta, Italienische Kunst des XX Jahrhunderts, March 1968, no. 16 (illustrated p. 17). This exhibition later travelled to Bochum, Städtische Kunstgalerie, May 1968; Cologne, Werkstätten Galerie der Spiegel, June-August 1968; Malmö, Malmö Museum, October 1968 and Stockholm, Liljevalchs Konsthall, November 1968.
Rome, Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, Cento opere d'arte italiana dal futurismo ad oggi, December 1968-January 1969, no. 16 (illustrated p. 51).
Jerusalem, The Israel Museum, Monet to Matisse: Modern Masters from Swiss Private Collections, October 1988-January 1989, p. 79.

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Published: L. Repaci, Galleria. Taccuino artistico degli anni di guerra, Milan, 1948 (illustrated p. 40).
E. Padovano, Dizionario degli artisti contemporanei, Milan, 1956 (illustrated p. 91).
G. Ballo, Pittori italiani dal futurismo a oggi, Naples, 1956 (illustrated p. 39).
M. Fagiolo dell'Arco, De Chirico. Gli anni Trenta, Milan 1995, no. 50 (illustrated p. 336).

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Notes: This work is sold with a photo certificate from Claudio Bruni Sakraischik, numbered 168/82 and dated 11 December 1982.

'The man of philosophic turn has a foreboding that underneath this reality in which we live and have our being, another and altogether different reality lies concealed, and that therefore it (the latter) is also an appearance.' (F. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy from O. Levy (ed.) The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, New York, 1911, p. 23.)

De Chirico's great series of paintings of mannequins that the artist began to paint during the height of the First World War present a series of tragic, lonely and abandoned figures lost in a strange melancholic world of artifice and enigma. Ettore (Hector) marks one of de Chircio's first returns to this theme, by depicting a lone troubadour-like Hector standing in the stage-set-like Italian piazza that distinguishes most of his earlier autumnal metaphysical landscapes.

The themes of loneliness, isolation and abandonment in these paintings of mannequins reflected de Chirico's own situation at the height of the war in Ferrara, when, on leave of absence from the army, he awaited his recall to military duty. In adopting the theme of Hector and Andromache as his subject, de Chirico was not only poking fun at a well-known subject of 19th Century history painting - the scene of the Trojan hero Hector bids his wife a last farewell before departing for the battle in which he would be slain - he was also presenting, in a deliberately inanimate and coldly dispassionate way, a scene of separation, and of undeniable pathos and human emotion, that was taking place on a daily basis all around him in wartime Italy.

Implicit within his mannequin paintings is also the satirical notion of the human being as a mere empty-headed automaton, a mechanical robot who fulfills his role in a bizarre mechanical universe. Unlike the Berlin dadaists, who soon took up this theme as a means of criticizing the brutality of authority, De Chirico's transmutation of the human into a dummy or a mechanical object is no satirizing of man's slave-like obedience to the powers that be, but rather a psychological portrait. For him, the impossible angles and geometry of the constructions that form these strange wooden figures are architectural elements that attempt to map and outline the contours of the poetic soul. Their very fakeness, illogicality and physical impossibility is intended as an indication of the complexity and supra-rationality of the figure depicted.

The metaphysics of de Chirico's painting was aimed at demonstrating the world of everyday reality to be but a facade within which a richer deeper undefineable and mysterious poetry lay. Trapped, bound and encumbered by all the props and artifice of physical construction, the sad lone warrior that de Chirico presents in this painting is one that hints at this alternate reality at the same time as it criticises the density and clumsiness of ours.

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