Due cavalli (Two Horses) represents de Chirico’s experimentation with “monochrome painting, or almost” that he theorised about in his Short Treatise on Painting Technique (1928).

Horses represented Giorgio de Chirico’s quintessential subject matter in the 1920s, featuring persistently in around fifty paintings during the artist’s second stay in Paris. Responding in part to Surrealism - a guiding movement in the period, with de Chirico acting unwittingly as one of the founding fathers of much of its mythology and imagery - the painter substituted the animal symbolic of change and vigour for the unchangeability of the urban mannequins in his paintings from the previous decade. The horses from the second half of the 1920s are represented in their wild state, in pairs, often racing and always on Mediterranean beaches. They symbolise memories that are both collective and personal, from the historical tradition of the Grand Tour to the de Chirico brothers’ childhood on the Greek coasts. It has been noted how the iconography of many of the horses from this period derives from the Répertoire de la statuaire grècque et romaine (1896- 1930), a compendium of ancient reliefs and statues reproduced in linear engravings, many of which were based on photographs, compiled by the erudite French archaeologist and religious historian Salomon Reinach. As Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco wrote, reading the work of Reinach triggered de Chirico’s “need to return to his beloved Greece, but through a filter, with a ‘dubbed’ and indirect image.”¹ As always in the artist’s imagery, here too the classical-style iconography creates a “domino effect” in which the present refers to a past that is even further back in time and deeply buried in memory. De Chirico himself, in his writings from this period, describes how the climate and visual culture of Art Deco Paris influenced the style of his paintings. In “Vale Lutetia” he talks about the surprising metaphysical result that derives from the contact between the “very soft grey” and the “mystery of the neutral colour” of the sky and the buildings of Paris on the one hand, and the electric colours of technicolour cinema and advertising posters on the other.² 

The Cerruti horses illustrate these contrasting colours perfectly. Due cavalli (Two Horses) represents de Chirico’s experimentation with “monochrome painting, or almost” that he theorised about in his Short Treatise on Painting Technique (1928).³ Chevaux se cabrant (Rearing Horses), on the other hand, features the slightly acidic colours of the advertising murals on Parisian walls, particularly the “coltish red of Poulain chocolate”, which for de Chirico had “the disturbing appearance of ancient divinities”.⁴

The Cerruti paintings illustrate another important aspect of de Chirico’s work from the period, the one linked to the market, which the artist strategically divided between two of the most powerful gallery owners in Paris between the two wars: Paul Guillaume, his first dealer, who had connections with the Surrealists, and Léonce Rosenberg, the go-to dealer for Cubist works following the liquidation of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler’s stock by the French state between 1921 and 1923. 

Regarding the provenance of Due cavalli, in a recent essay Giorgia Chierici tells us that it was bought by Pierre Matisse in February 1929 from the Paris Bernheim-Jeune gallery for a modest sum.⁵ Pierre Matisse worked at that time as an intermediary for the New York gallerist Valentine Dudensing, owner of the Valentine Gallery, who offered de Chirico his first solo show in the States in January 1928. We still do not know whether Bernheim-Jeune obtained the painting from Paul Guillaume, with whom Dudensing and Matisse organised the 1928 exhibition, or via Léonce Rosenberg, with whom the two American dealers worked on the second show of the artist, always at the Valentine Gallery, between the end of 1928 and the beginning of 1929. In any case, the work testifies to the huge success that de Chirico’s paintings of horses enjoyed on the American market, thanks also to the suport of great dealers such as Guillaume, Rosenberg, Matisse and Dudensing: in March 1929, less than a month after Matisse bought the painting, Dudensing resold it to the painter Margarett Sargent (Shaw) McKean, a keen collector of de Chirico’s works in the 1920s for more than double the amount originally paid.⁶ 

An authentication by the de Chirico expert Claudio Bruno Sakraischik in 1980, along with the caption accompanying the work in Bruni’s catalogue raisonné of 1987, tell us that the painting remained in a private collection in New York until reemerging in an exhibition at Mitzi Sotis’s gallery in Rome in 1987, the year it was probably purchased by Cerruti.⁷

Chevaux se cabrant, on the other hand, was certainly handled by Guillaume’s competitor, Léonce Rosenberg. The painting features in the first of the two photo albums of de Chirico pieces that passed through Rosenberg’s Galerie de l’Effort Moderne.⁸ In October 1928, Rosenberg sent it to the de Chirico solo exhibition he organised at the Tooth & Sons gallery in London.⁹ 

Silvia Loreti

¹Verona-Milan 1986-87, p. 128.

²G. de Chirico, “Vale Lutetia” (February 1925), in De Chirico 198s, p. 268.

³Ibid., p. 312.

⁴G. de Chirico, “Salve Lutetia” (1927), in De Chirico 1985, p. 275.

⁵Chierici 2019, pp. 319, 327, 333.

⁶I would like to thank Julia May Boddewyn of the Valentine Gallery for generously sharing her research on Dudensing and McKean (www.thevalentinegallery.org). The material put together by Boddewyn allows us to correct the erroneous identification of this painting, inventoried by Matisse as White Horses, with the work Fighting Horses in McKean’s lists. In fact, in the latter, the Cerruti painting, reproduced for the first time in an auction catalogue of the painter’s legacy as Due cavalli, appears with the simple title of Horses. In the Margarett McKean inventories, drawn up by her niece, Honor Moore, conserved in the Schlesinger Library (Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University) and made available to Boddewyn, the full title of Fighting Horses is Fighting Horses (Two Wounded Horses Before the Walls of Troy). This allows us to identify that painting as the Chevaux percés par les flèches (now in a private collection, Turin). Instead, Due cavalli can be identified with Horses thanks to its dimensions (21 x 17 ½, or 22 x 18 inches]). Grateful thanks to María Isabel Molestina-Kurlat (Head of Reader Searches, The Morgan Library & Museum, New York) for having kindly made the documents from the Pierre Matisse Archive available.

⁷I would like to thank Katherine Robinson for the information on Bruni’s authentication.

⁸“Album Giorgio de Chirico, tome I”, no. 1043 (Centre Pompidou/MNAM-CCI/Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Léonce Rosenberg collection, LROS 32).

⁹Giorgio De Chirico, à la Arthur Tooth’s Galleries, Londres, ottobre 1928, no. 13, ill. (Centre Pompidou/MNAMCCI/ Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Léonce Rosenberg Rosenberg collection, LROS 29).