Urban untimely: Giorgio de Chirico and the metaphysical city

Urban Untimely examines the relationship between two principal aspects of Giorgio de Chirico's Metaphysical paintings (1909-1919): their consistent use of architecture as a compositional premise, and their nuanced adaptations of Nietzschean philosophy. This dissertation considers how and why the representation of architecture, urban, and sub-urban space constitutes the chief facet of what de Chirico calls "la methode nietzschieenne." Departing from the iconographic and iconological tendencies that have dominated studies of Metaphysical painting, Urban Untimely argues that the ideologies latent in de Chirico's images derive as much from their formal, structural, and compositional strategies as from their famed, strange constellations of objects. Through close readings of particular images and texts by both Nietzsche and de Chirico, I consider how the painter distills Nietzschean theories of oracular language, aphorism, philology, and untimeliness into a pictorial architectonics: at once peculiarly Greco-Roman and drained of any temporal or topographic specificity; at once a spectral evocation of the city and its genealogies, and a rejection of history and its bearing upon matter and memory.;A substantial introductory chapter examines changes in de Chirico's painting after his arrival in Paris in 1911. I pay close attention to these pictures' mounting ambivalences between narrative and abstraction, architectural coherence and spatial disorientation, inhabitable depth and radical flatness. These vacillating registers derive, I argue, from de Chirico's affinities for philosophical and "literary" themes, as well as his attendant, oblique engagement with the pictorial language of Parisian modernism (particularly Cubism and abstraction).;Each of the three subsequent chapters focuses on a single, relatively understudied painting from 1914, which de Chirico deemed "the fatal year." Chapter Two concentrates on de Chirico's Gare Montparnasse, and considers how this image adapts aspects of early twentieth-century Parisian urbanism to painting, while simultaneously abstracting its eponymous train station into a metaphor for spatial equivocation. Examining the network of framing, isolation, and poised displacement in The Enigma of Fatality , Chapter Three argues for de Chirico's use of "painted collage" as a pictorial application of Nietzsche's theory of the Eternal Return. The conflation of prehistory and hypermodernity in the strange objects of The Evil Genius of a King lies at the core of Chapter Four, which situates de Chirico's evocations of Pre-Socratic myth, ritual, and time in relation to contemporary avant-garde notions of primitivism.