Giorgio de Chirico
Painted empty arcades and long shadows before he was thirty, and repainted them for the next fifty years.
Giorgio de Chirico was born to Italian parents in Greece in 1888 and produced between about 1909 and 1919 the Metaphysical paintings that made him: empty Italian piazzas, arcades in raking light, faceless mannequins, trains on the horizon, objects assembled without a reason. The Surrealists took him as a founding father, and then broke with him furiously when he repudiated modernism, turned to a neo-baroque manner, and began producing new versions of his own early pictures — sometimes backdated. He continued doing so until his death in Rome in 1978.
That practice is the central problem and the central skill in this market. Genuine de Chirico paintings exist in three categories that are priced very differently: the original metaphysical works of the 1910s, the artist's own later repetitions, and outright forgeries, of which there are a great many. Dating, materials analysis and the archives of the Fondazione Giorgio e Isa de Chirico are all normally required. The lithographic and etched output of the post-war decades is large and much more straightforward. Provenance across the 1930s and 1940s should be checked carefully as a matter of course.
If you own a work by Giorgio de Chirico
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.