De Chirico: The greetings of a distant friend

This essay attempts to decode two of Giorgio de Chirico’s pictorial puzzles, The jewish Angel (fig. 1) and The Greetings of a Distant Friend (fig. 2), both closely related and both painted in 1916. This analysis takes into account the artist’s biography, his writings, his familiarity with the work of both Nietzsche (Schmied, 1982) and Freud (Pincus-Witten, 1984), and the relationship between these two paintings and others in de Chirico’s oeuvre. Both paintings feature a huge, pupilless, schematic eye painted not as an independent entity but subordinated by being depicted as a piece of cardboard, with one edge folded over in a Cubistlike trompe l’oeil. Cubist language, originally used for structural purposes, is applied here in relation to an expressive human feature. De Chirico utilizes this indirect language to suggest a time sequence; he does not refer to a present experience but to the memory of a past occurrence.