ITP 45: The Uncertainty of the Poet, by Giorgio de Chirico

Date: 25-02-2001
Owning Institution: Tate Modern
Publication:   Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”      
Subject: 20th Century        

Today being the fifty-fifth anniversary of the first post-war sale of bananas to the British public, this week’s picture is Giorgio de Chirico’s The Uncertainty of the Poet. No other painting of note contains so many bananas (twenty-three, in all); and in no other work has that once exotic fruit been made to seem more charged with mystery. Placed with evident but perplexing deliberation, next to a broken marble torso of Aphrodite, within an empty sunlit square, the inexplicable bunch of bananas seems at once familiar and very strange.

De Chirico painted the picture in 1913, at a time when he was striving to formulate the principles of what he called “Arte Metafisica”, or Metaphysical Art. He wanted, he said, not merely to reproduce external reality but to evoke the “strange sensations” that he often experienced in ordinary life - moments of “revelation”, as he termed it, which were occasioned in him by the most apparently mundane sights and sounds. De Chrico’s revelations came to him principally in the form of the melancholy and intense feelings that he often had when wandering alone in certain places. His principal sensation at such moments seems to have been a heightened belief that the world had no significance and no purpose - that in every aspect of its being it served simply to mock man’s pathetic need for order, for belief systems, for religious faith.

De Chirico experienced one of the first and sharpest of these gloomy epiphanies of alienation while out walking one day in Versailles. He was pondering the exuberant but ultimately nihilistic philosophy of his contemporary Friedrich Nietszche when suddenly he felt the “cold shiver, the profound and solitary joy of revelation”:

“I found myself in the courtyard of the palace at Versailles. Everything looked at me with a strange and questioning glance. I saw then that every angle of the palace, every column, every window had a soul that was an enigma. I looked about me at the stone heroes, motionless under a bright sky, under the cold rays of the winter sun shining without love like a profound song… And then more than ever I felt that everything was inevitably there, but for no reason and without any meaning.”

The artist had several similar and equally powerful experiences in Italy, notably in Florence and in Rome, where he was profoundly moved by the empty arcades of antiquity as well as by “shadows on old walls and a curious music, profoundly blue, having something of an afternoon at the seaside…”

All these elements have been brought together in The Uncertainty of the Poet, which might just as aptly be titled The Poetry of Uncertainty, since that would seem to be its true theme. It is an index or inventory of many of the artist’s favourite subjects: the empty arcade; the barren piazza; the once proud broken statue; the sharp clear light of an afternoon where nothing much of any consequence would seem to be happening - to all of which, to enhance the general sense of lassitude and enigma, de Chirico has added the image of a train bound for who knows where; the furled sail of a moored ship; and, last but not least, those twenty-three curiously sinister bananas.

Various attempts of a more or less Freudian character have been made to relate the iconography of de Chirico’s paintings to his presumed personal obsessions - as if each image that he created were, so to speak, an entry in the painter’s dream diary, to be interpreted and decoded by the subtle psychoanalyst. To take this particular picture: the ship with its furled sail has been said to allude to his childhood in Volos, on the coast of Greece, from whence Jason and the Argonauts set out in search of the Golden Fleece; the diminutive train chugging away behind the faraway red brick wall has been assumed to represent the painter’s father, who had been an engineer on the Thessallanian railway, and with whom de Chirico is said to have a had a difficult and distant relationship; while the mutilated statue of a naked woman has been viewed (predictably) as a vengeful portrait of the artist’s apparently rather domineering mother.

The significance of the multitudinous phallic bananas has, needless to say, also been the cause of much debate, summed up admirably albeit with tongue firmly in cheek by James Thrall Soby in his book The Early Chirico: “To the stricter Freudians, it has connoted the painter’s sexual frustrations or maladjustment. To adherents of the Oedipus complex as the root of nearly all human aspiration, vicious or benign, it appears certain that de Chirico subconsciously transformed his parents into edible objects in order to destroy them in the most pleasurable manner.” The author himself prefers the less devious explanation that de Chirico simply adored sweet things, and left traces of his own “obsessive gourmandism” in his art.

But perhaps the most sensible way to approach the picture is that suggested by its creator himself. Although The Uncertainty of the Poet superficially resembles an attempt to paint dreams and nightmares - a fact which explains why de Chirico was so fervently and wrongheadedly admired by the later Surrealists - it is actually no such thing. It is instead an evocation of waking experience: a pictorial equivalent to, or metaphor for, a very particular and disturbing sense of revelation, experienced by an evidently somewhat morose young man - someone who had come to believe that that the universe is a great and enigmatic void, indifferent to all the efforts, thoughts and creations of humanity. The empty square and untenanted arcade seem to epitomise that void - de Chirico spoke of his imaginary architectural settings as images or archetypes of “inexorable, hostile reality” - while the absurd little train and the ship ready for departure may perhaps symbolise mankind’s perennial, busy need for activity, for goals and aspirations. The broken statue, traditional vanitas motif, may have been intended to put the painter’s audience in mind of all the dead cults that man has devised to ward off the spectre of his own irrelevance. And the bananas? Perhaps, in fact, they have no meaning at all. Perhaps they are simply there because (like so many other things in the world as de Chirico had come to see it) they are there. After all it would be strange indeed if, in a painting meant to express the conviction that nothing makes sense, everything did.