Giorgio De Chirico Essay

Modernity describes the social changes created by increasing industrialization, quickly developing technologies, and rising capitalism (Bock 7). Sigmund Freud was instrumental in understanding how the social changes of modernity affected people’s psyche (4). In my collage, I attempted to represent Freud’s concept of the unconscious, which he defines as the mental processes that motivate people’s thoughts and actions, but are repressed, and therefore that are not consciously accessible (Freud 89). I represented the unconscious in my collage because the unconscious is a recurring theme in Giorgio de Chirico’s early work, though he rejected it entirely in his later career, and using the concept of the unconscious I would be able to examine de Chirico’s relation to modernity.

As an example, the art object that I chose depicts a dreamlike Italian town square in which “absence is the real protagonist” (“CHIRICO”). However, the theme of the unconscious is even more present in de Chirico’s interior still lives. He painted motley assemblages of the objects that cluttered his psyche, such as cakes, easels, chess boards, and mannequins (“CHIRICO”). Although de Chirico was not familiar with Freud’s writings, he was still influenced by the increasing importance of subjectivity and the psyche brought by modernity (Gale). Furthermore, the instincts that are usually thought to be repressed in the unconscious are sexual or aggressive in nature, but in de Chirico’s work, the repressed instinct that is represented are eating instincts, since he often painted what he could not eat due to gastrointestinal problems, such as cakes, pastries and fish (Henning 143). In my collage, I added a few of the pastries that de Chirico thought were “metaphysical” in shape, and manifested his repressed desire to eat sweets