Giorgio de Chirico - Legacy

Legacy

De Chirico won praise for his work almost immediately from writer Guillaume Apollinaire, who helped to introduce his work to the later Surrealists. De Chirico strongly influenced the Surrealist movement: Yves Tanguy wrote how one day in 1922 he saw one of De Chirico's paintings in an art dealer's window, and was so impressed by it he resolved on the spot to become an artist—although he had never even held a brush. Other Surrealists who acknowledged De Chirico's influence include Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, and René Magritte. Other artists as diverse as Giorgio Morandi, Carlo Carrà and Philip Guston were influenced by De Chirico.

Chirico's style has influenced several filmmakers, particularly in the 1950s through 1970s. The visual style of the French animated movie Le Roi et l'oiseau, by Paul Grimault and Jacques Prévert, was influenced by de Chirico's work, primarily via Tanguy, a friend of Prévert. The visual style of Valerio Zurlini's film The Desert of the Tartars (1976) was influenced by De Chirico's work. Michelangelo Antonioni, the Italian film director, also claimed to be influenced by De Chirico. Some comparison can be made to the long takes in Antonioni's films from the 1960s, in which the camera continues to linger on desolate cityscapes populated by a few distant figures, or none at all, in the absence of the film's protagonists.

Modern photographer Duane Michals was also influenced by De Chirico.

Writers who have appreciated De Chirico include John Ashbery, who has called Hebdomeros "probably...the finest ." Several of Sylvia Plath's poems are influenced by De Chirico. In his book Blizzard of One Mark Strand included a poetic diptych called "Two de Chiricos:" "The Philosopher's Conquest" and "The Disquieting Muses."

Fumito Ueda's critically acclaimed PlayStation 2 game Ico (and also its sequel, Shadow of the Colossus, in a less direct way) was strongly influenced by De Chirico. Ico features children wandering though huge, ancient and otherwise uninhabited buildings, are predominately yellow and green in colour and use music only for cut-scenes, enhancing the feeling of space and sparseness. The box art for Ico used in Japan and Europe is particularly imitative of De Chirico's Mystery and Melancholy of a Street and The Nostalgia of the Infinite (both 1914).