"I believe, however, that such abnormal moments can be found in everyone, and it is all the more fortunate when they occur in individuals with creative talent or with clairvoyant powers"
About this Quote
De Chirico is smuggling a defense of the uncanny into what sounds like a polite psychological observation. “Abnormal moments” isn’t just a clinical label; it’s a permission slip. He’s naming those flashes when reality slips its leash - the sudden sense that a street corner is staged, that objects carry secret messages, that time feels slightly misaligned. For most people, those moments get filed under stress, superstition, or embarrassment. De Chirico treats them as raw material.
The sly pivot is in “all the more fortunate.” Fortune for whom? For the individual, yes, but also for culture. He’s arguing that art advances not through steady-minded competence but through periodic derailment - when perception glitches and the mind becomes briefly “clairvoyant.” That word matters. It raises the stakes beyond imagination into a quasi-mystical claim: the artist doesn’t merely invent strangeness; he receives it, like a broadcast.
Context does the rest. De Chirico helped inaugurate Metaphysical Painting, with its long shadows, empty plazas, mannequins, and anxious stillness - images that feel like déjà vu without an origin. In the early 20th century, Europe was flooded with new models of the mind (Freud, spiritualism, modern physics), and artists were fighting academic realism with the irrational. De Chirico’s line plants his flag: the “abnormal” is not a defect to be corrected but a portal. Creative talent doesn’t cure the disturbance; it dignifies it, turns private disorientation into a public language.
The sly pivot is in “all the more fortunate.” Fortune for whom? For the individual, yes, but also for culture. He’s arguing that art advances not through steady-minded competence but through periodic derailment - when perception glitches and the mind becomes briefly “clairvoyant.” That word matters. It raises the stakes beyond imagination into a quasi-mystical claim: the artist doesn’t merely invent strangeness; he receives it, like a broadcast.
Context does the rest. De Chirico helped inaugurate Metaphysical Painting, with its long shadows, empty plazas, mannequins, and anxious stillness - images that feel like déjà vu without an origin. In the early 20th century, Europe was flooded with new models of the mind (Freud, spiritualism, modern physics), and artists were fighting academic realism with the irrational. De Chirico’s line plants his flag: the “abnormal” is not a defect to be corrected but a portal. Creative talent doesn’t cure the disturbance; it dignifies it, turns private disorientation into a public language.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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