Paolo Baldacci

Le chapitre consacré à Max Ernst (par Jürgen Pech) s'ouvrant par cette phrase-manifeste du peintre prononcée en 1956 :
Shaking off one's blindness is the vocation of mankind.*

The pleasure in every successful metamorphosis relates not so much to a wretched desire for aesthetic distraction as to the intellect's primal , vital need to shake off the deceptive and tedious paradise of fixed memories and explore a new , incomparably broader field of experience in which the borders between the ' inner ' and ' outer ' worlds ( in classical philosophical terms ) become more and more blurred and will probably one day completely disappear , if more precise methods than écriture automatique can be found.
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Arturo Nathan, … a self-taught artist, is the most resolute at considering reality a psychological field.
Art has but one subject : its author’s spirit, in the profound and contemplative things it contains, and in what is part of his innermost life.
L’Art n’a qu’un seul sujet : l’esprit de son Auteur, en ce qu’il contient de profond, de recueilli et en ce qui fait partie de sa vie intime. » Citation d’une lettre d’Arturo Nathan à un ami.
In 1944 he was deported to Germany, first to the concentration camp of Belsen and then to Biberach, where he died of hunger. When the Allies arrived, he died with the first spoonful of soup they gave him.

When he decided to submit his work to public and critical opinion, De Chirico also began to write notes on poetics, intended as guidelines to help explain his artistic objectives and interpret his paintings. These notes — the most important of which, mixed with lyrical prose and poetic compositions, are dated between late 1911 and early 1914 — are conventionally referred to as the « Parisian manuscripts ». First published in a partial form and with a rather inaccurate English translation by James Thrall Soby in the second edition of his 1955 monograph, they immediately constituted the chief basis for the philological study of Metaphysical painting.
We have no way of knowing if anyone saw or read them in the brief period in which, before the war, De Chirico began to garner some interest in the circle of Guillaume Apollinaire and Les Soirées de Paris, but there is no question that they were known and used in Surrealist circles after the author gave them to Paul Éluard in 1923. It is also likely that in 1913–4 Apollinaire had the chance to read some of them or hear De Chirico offer similar thoughts and considerations, which he used for his brief critiques published in the newspapers of the era.

Giorgio de Chirico, one of the Italian artists who most influenced 20th-century art, first became aware of the mysterious relationship between the physical reality we see and the invisible conceptual reality harboured in our spirit while visiting Florence at the age of 21.
« One clear autumnal afternoon I was sitting on a bench in the middle of the Piazza Santa Croce in Florence… Then I had the strange impression that I was looking at all these things for the first time, and the composition of my picture came to my mind’s eye. Now each time I look at this painting I again see that moment. Nevertheless the moment is an enigma to me, for it is inexplicable. »
The « Florentine revelation » of October 1909