Giorgio de Chirico

Paul Guillaume, Paris
Chester H. Johnson Gallery, Chicago
Sale: Christie's New York, 11th May 1995, lot 362
Private Collection, Europe (purchased at the above sale; sale: Christie's London, 16th October, 2006, lot 204)
Purchased at the above sale by the present owner

Chicago, The Art Institue, A Century of Progress, 1933, no. 771

The canvas is lined and UV examination reveals a small area of retouching to the righthand side of the temple and small spots of retouching at intervals along the extreme right and lower edges. There is some minor craquelure in places mainly towards the centre of the left edge. Otherwise, this work is in overall good condition. Colours: overall fairly accurate in the printed catalogue, though slightly lighter and less saturated in the original.
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Tempio in una stanza, circa 1926, is a remarkable example of many of de Chirico's most celebrated artistic elements. The viewer is invited into a disorientating world, and is immediately forced to perceive commonplace imagery with fresh eyes. Inside a room, there is a temple atop a craggy crop of rocks, and a lapping sea. Scale is irrational and the relationship between exterior and interior is wonderfully ambiguous. The scene is imbued with de Chirico's characteristic dreamlike atmosphere, in which time seems to have been suspended: a positively tangible ambience that distinguishes the artist's most successful works.

The process of the displacement of an object from its original context was a primary concern for much of the twentieth century artistic avant-garde: it was Marcel Duchamp's raison d'être, the pillar of the Illusionist branch of Surrealism, and is still being used to challenge common perceptions in contemporary art to this day. In the present work, de Chirico has put a temple in an unexpected context, thereby completely altering the way that we look at that temple, and fulfilling his 'search for a second identity in objects' (William Rubin, 'De Chirico and Modernism', in De Chirico (exhibition catalogue), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1982, p. 57). A painting of a temple on the rocks in its usual context would illicit the commonplace associations, but by placing it inside of another building, we are literally cornered into viewing (or rather re-viewing) our psychological relationship to the subject, as well as considering the house as a metaphor. Interpreting the painting becomes 'a matter of the viewer's intuition, his ability to appreciate the resonance of the image's interwoven poetic and plastic incongruities' (ibid., p. 57).

The metaphor of the house is fertile ground for artistic exploration, a springboard that has created some of the most powerful images of twentieth century art and Magritte was another artist who was fascinated by the exploration of the interior/exterior theme. Though many artists have focused on the claustrophobic character of the 'house' or 'room', the present work is dreamlike and unthreatening. It might well be a disorientating space, but it is not an anxious one. De Chirico's haunting piazza paintings suggest that the artist is more agoraphobic than claustrophobic. In the spirit of German Expressionists, such as Edvard Munch, the vertigo of the outside world overwhelms de Chirico, whose gravitation towards, and fascination for, Italian city squares might be explained by their reassuring capacity to enclose. Georges Perec has described the house as 'a vacuum full of promise', a suitably open-ended description for the present work. De Chirico is asking the viewer to be astonished by that which has ceased to astonish us, and the present work is testament to this important quest.