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Lot Essay
Painted circa 1926, Una camera nel museo is filled with the mysterious atmosphere so distinctive of de Chirico's works. A lapping sea and a mountain topped with a temple are displayed, with space between them, in the impossible confines of a small room, apparently in a museum. Yet this is clearly a museum of the mind, inhabiting a space similar to the timeless Italian piazze that recur in his works. And it is this timelessness that is key, for de Chirico, who the previous decade had declared, 'pictor classicus sum,' sought to create a painting that was eternal, universal and true.
The theme of the room in a museum is particularly apt for de Chirico, reflecting as it does the tangible, everyday manifestation of the ideas of memory and history that so concerned him. The museum is the literal embodiment of the jumbled shards of memory that interested de Chirico. Here, with the temple on the rocks within this impossible room, this mental compartment, the physical manifestation of assorted memories appear unarranged, with space between the isolated lapping waves and the rocks upon which the temple perches. In a sense, de Chirico is showing a mythological vision within a realm that hints of a personal association with the scenes, and yet this process also functions in the reverse direction: de Chirico's own personal memories are crystallising within his mythology, becoming classical and therefore timeless and universal. Una camera nel museo dates from de Chirico's second major period living in Paris. During this period, his wife Raissa, whom he had married in 1925, studied archaeology, a subject that necessarily influenced de Chirico with its strange salvage of lost memories, stories, lives and mythology, while the presence of so many formidable collections of antiquities in Paris must also have had their impact upon him, tapping as they did into his own deeply-felt concerns about the cyclical nature of time and the ability of the past to penetrate and reappear in our present.
It was during this time that the pioneer of the Pittura Metafisica came into direct contact with many of the budding Surrealists with whom he had already been in contact, and several of whom he had met. De Chirico's paintings had provided the epiphanies for several of the Surrealists, prompting their conversion to that movement and its possibilities. While their overly Freudian interpretations of his atmospheric and sometimes discordant visual universe were at odds with de Chirico's beliefs concerning the nature of time and history, Una camera nel museo-- with its impossible and incongruous display of movement and architecture within a room that feels domestic in scale-- is nonetheless a precursor and a cousin of many of the developments that were to define the budding Surrealist movement.
The theme of the room in a museum is particularly apt for de Chirico, reflecting as it does the tangible, everyday manifestation of the ideas of memory and history that so concerned him. The museum is the literal embodiment of the jumbled shards of memory that interested de Chirico. Here, with the temple on the rocks within this impossible room, this mental compartment, the physical manifestation of assorted memories appear unarranged, with space between the isolated lapping waves and the rocks upon which the temple perches. In a sense, de Chirico is showing a mythological vision within a realm that hints of a personal association with the scenes, and yet this process also functions in the reverse direction: de Chirico's own personal memories are crystallising within his mythology, becoming classical and therefore timeless and universal. Una camera nel museo dates from de Chirico's second major period living in Paris. During this period, his wife Raissa, whom he had married in 1925, studied archaeology, a subject that necessarily influenced de Chirico with its strange salvage of lost memories, stories, lives and mythology, while the presence of so many formidable collections of antiquities in Paris must also have had their impact upon him, tapping as they did into his own deeply-felt concerns about the cyclical nature of time and the ability of the past to penetrate and reappear in our present.
It was during this time that the pioneer of the Pittura Metafisica came into direct contact with many of the budding Surrealists with whom he had already been in contact, and several of whom he had met. De Chirico's paintings had provided the epiphanies for several of the Surrealists, prompting their conversion to that movement and its possibilities. While their overly Freudian interpretations of his atmospheric and sometimes discordant visual universe were at odds with de Chirico's beliefs concerning the nature of time and history, Una camera nel museo-- with its impossible and incongruous display of movement and architecture within a room that feels domestic in scale-- is nonetheless a precursor and a cousin of many of the developments that were to define the budding Surrealist movement.