Le printemps de l’ingénieur

The painting, made in the fall of 1914 in Paris where the artist had been living since 1911, was left unfinished because of his hasty return home in May 1915, when Italy entered the war and de Chirico and his brother Andrea (who had recently taken the name Alberto Savinio) decided to enlist as volunteers so as not to be considered “outgoing deserters” and to take advantage of the amnesty granted to those who spontaneously turned up.

The partly unresolved work has an extremely interesting experimental imprint because it gives a glimpse of the artist’s formal and inventive processes at a conclusive moment for developments in metaphysical painting. Centered on the Böcklin-like female figure, which is a variant of the old-fashioned draped mannequins of other coeval paintings, the composition proposes a series of “objects of memory”: the brick wall, the crenellated cylindrical tower, the geometric solids, the picture within the picture, developed according to the poetics of enigma and irony that is reflected in the theory of the “solitude of signs” outlined by the artist in his 1919 writings.

Signature and date (anticipated by a year), according to a probable and credited hypothesis, were placed later either by de Chirico himself, or by Paul Guillaume, the famous dealer who had purchased the painting in 1918. After appearing on the Parisian, then London, and then Italian markets, the canvas was acquired by a private collector in 1998 through the exercise of the export purchase right.