De Chirico in the René Gaffé Collection& the Role of E.L.T Mesens
The archival materials cited in this essay are courtesy of The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles 43 De Chirico in the René Gaffé Collection & the Role of E.L.T Mesens (Brussels – London) Victoria Noel-Johnson In 1946, René Gaffé (Brussels, 1887-1968) – the Belgian journal- ist, author, collector and bibliophile - wrote a short monograph dedicated to Giorgio de Chirico entitled Giorgio de Chirico. Le voy- ant (Éditions La Boétie, Brussels, fig. 1).1 Published in Gaffé’s na- tive city, the book contains an extensive yet overlooked essay about de Chirico’s early Metaphysical work, as well as a total of 24 black and white reproductions of important paintings executed in the 1910s and 1920s. As an important connoisseur and collector of de Chirico’s œuvre, together with work by Belgian Surrealists such as René Magritte and Paul Delvaux, this article will principally focus on Gaffé’s keen interest in de Chirico, which, in turn, helped disseminate knowledge about his painting within Belgium during fig. 1 R. Gaffé, Giorgio de Chirico. Le 2 the early twentieth century. As his impressive art collection was Voyant, Éditions La Boétie, Brussels, 1946 built and then partly sold off with the intervention of Eduoard Léon Théodore Mesens (Brussels, 1903-1971), a Belgian gallerist and editor who championed Surrealism in Belgium and later in the UK (mainly initiated by the 1937 sale of a substantial part of Gaffé’s collection to the British collector Roland Penrose), this paper will also examine Mesens’ involvement in the acquisition and sale of Gaffé’s de Chiricos.3 1 This article is the expanded and revised version of the article Le voyant: analyse des liens entre René Gaffé et Giorgio de Chirico, in Giorgio de Chirico.
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