DescriptionBorn in Greece to Italian parents, Giorgio de Chirico received his first drawing lessons at the Polytechnic Institute in Athens in 1900. In 1906, the family moved to Munich, where he attended the Academy of Fine Arts, becoming acquainted with the magic realism of Swiss-German painter Arnold Böcklin and the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, who encouraged the artist to "refute reality." At various important junctures in his career de Chirico lived in Paris (1911–15, 1925–32), as well as the United States (1936–38), but he spent most of his life in Italy. In Ferrara in 1917 he met the artist Carlo Carrà, with whom he articulated a "metaphysical" style of painting in which an illogical reality seemed credible. Although the Metaphysical School was short-lived, its ramifications were felt in subsequent art movements, such as Dada and Surrealism.

This composition presents one of the artist's famous deserted public squares rendered in simple broad forms. Somber monolithic arches on the right cast a heavy geometric shadow filling two­thirds of the right foreground. On the left, seen slightly from above and in a vertical perspective, is the statue of the sleeping Ariadne. The background is sealed by a brick wall, beyond which rises a squat white tower. A distant train approaches from the left, a sailing ship from the right. The palette consists of ocher, deep brown, white, and green.

"Ariadne" is part of a series of five paintings, all of 1913, in which the statue of Ariadne plays a major iconographic role. This statue is a Roman copy of a lost Hellenistic sculpture of Ariadne asleep on the island of Naxos, where she had been abandoned by Theseus. The sculpture of Ariadne had great symbolic meaning for de Chirico, perhaps evoking the classical past to which he had been exposed during his childhood in Greece. In these works Ariadne is seen from various angles, horizontally, vertically, and in partial close-up. The most important paintings in the series are "Ariadne," "The Soothsayers Recompence" (1913; Philadelphia Museum of Art), and "The Silent Statue" (1913; formerly Jean Paulhan, Paris).

"Ariadne" is executed in the dry, thin manner that characterizes de Chirico's works of 1913–14. The artist created this composition, which belongs to his most elegiac early period, while living in Paris (1911–15). The "early" de Chirico, still a painter of simple and magical dreamlike pictures, as exemplified by "Ariadne," became one of the acknowledged predecessors of the Surrealists.

Signatures, Inscriptions, and MarkingsSignature: [lower right]: Giorgio de Chirico /M.CM.XIII.

ProvenanceThe artist, Paris Jean Paulhan, Paris (1924/5-early 1959/60) Galerie Jan Krugier, Geneva, (1959/60) Pierre Matisse, New York (?) Mr. and Mrs. Samuel A. Marx, Chicago (1959/60-1964) Mrs. Florene M. Schoenborn (widow of Mr. Samuel A. Marx), New York (1964-1995)

Selected Exhibition HistoryNew York: The Museum of Modern Art, The School of Paris. Paintings from the Florene May Schoenborn & Samuel A. Marx Collection, November 2, 1965 - January 2, 1966, pp. 44-45, ill. Traveled to: The Art Institute of Chicago, City Art Museum of St. Louis, San Francisco Museum of Art, Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico.

New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Florene M. Schoenborn Bequest, 12 Artists of the School of Paris, February 11 - August 31, 1997 (brochure) no. 5, ill. in color and cover.

New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Painters in Paris, 1895 - 1950, March 8 - December 31, 2000, p. 82, ill. in color.

London, England: Tate Modern, September 20, 2001 - January 1, 2002; New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, February 6 - May 12, 2002. Surrealism: Desire Unbound. fig.41, p. 60, (illus. in color).

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: The Philadelphia Museum of Art, November 3, 2002 - January 5, 2003; London: Estorick Collection of Modern Itailan Art, January 22-April 13, 2003, Giorgio de Chirico and the Myth of Ariadne. Plate 10, p. 94 and p. 2, illus. in color, cat. entry p. 204

Giorgio de Chirico Retrospective, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, February 12, 2009- May 24, 2009, pg. 56-57, cat. no. 19.

Selected BibliographyFagiolo dell'Arco, Maurizio. L'opera completa di De Chirico, 1908-1924. Rizzoli Editore, Milan, 1984, no. 26, ill.

Soby, James Thrall. Giorgio de Chirico. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1955, p. 52-56, p. 178,ill.