De Chirico’s “Long American Shadow”
by Ara H. MERJIAN
Painted in Paris and Ferrara in the mid-1910s, several of Giorgio de Chirico’s Metaphysical paintings like The Seer (1914-15) indeed recall the prosthetic bodies that came to populate Europe’s cities in the wake of the Great War. Perched on a stage-like rostrum like a shop window prophet, The Seer epitomizes de Chirico’s Nietzsche-inspired vow “to see everything, even man, in its quality of thing.”