«Londra d’estate è quanto mai metafisica».
Giorgio de Chirico e la Galleria Alex. Reid & Lefevre (1937-1939)

Quaderni Monografici. Dossier I
by Flavia Matitti and Gerd Roos
Milan, 2012
ISBN-13: 9788889546437
Format 21 x 28 cm
96 pages b/w

«The Lefevre gallery in London, that is more serious and less stupid than the usually useless galleries dedicated to modern painting, put up a one-man exhibition of my most recent work and I personally made the trip to London». Thus, Giorgio de Chirico wrote in his Memoirs about the exhibition held at Galleria Alex. Reid & Lefevre in July 1938 in London, a city where the artist experienced ‘hours of profound metaphysical emotion’. The artistic, commercial and personal events linked to the project and the organisation of this important exhibition can now be followed in great detail thanks to the discovery of the correspondence between Giorgio de Chirico and the London-based gallery: thirty-seven documents published here and critically commented upon for the first time. A rigorous cataloguing of the thirty-one works included in the exhibition, of which approximately half have been identified, completes the study and provides a new contribution to a future Catalogue Raisonné of Giorgio de Chirico’s work.