At the Strozzi Palace in Florence the exhibition “De Chirico, Max Ernst, Magritte, Balthus. A look into the invisible” will be on until July 18,  2010.

This exhibition explores the early years of the career of De Chirico and the influence of his first works on movements such as Surrealism and the Neue Sachlichkeit.

De Chirico was born in 1888 in Greece and partly raised there, where his engineer father designed and built railway lines. He had a prolific artistic career, and lived to a grand old age, almost as long as Picasso. He died in 1978. Having studied in Munich, at the age of twenty-one and fascinated by the work of the Symbolist painter Arnold Böcklin, he began to paint a series of strange and oneiric cityscapes. Displayed in Paris after 1911 they were enthusiastically greeted by painters and poets from Picasso to Paul Éluard, and very soon De Chirico became one of the heroes of Surrealism.
Exhibition hours: Daily 9 a.m-8 p.m, Thursday 9 a.m-11 p.m