Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) was an Italian painter, sculptor and writer who invented metaphysical painting under the sign of revelation.
He moved to Paris in 1911 and first fascinated Guillaume Apollinaire who, in 1913, introduced the artist into his circle - Picasso, Derain, Max Jacob, Braque, Picabia, etc. - as well as Paul Guillaume, his first merchant.
The dreamlike, prophetic dimension, the subtle incongruities and the shifts observed in the work of Giorgio de Chirico have, from the beginning of the 1920s, immediate resonances on the nascent surrealism, from Magritte, Ernst to Picabia and Eluard. André Breton sees in the artist the demiurge of a “modern mythology" in formation (1920) before accusing him of anti-modernist regressions in 1926.