Migraine aura as source of Giorgio de Chirico's artistic inspiration – An Interview with Matthew V. Gale

By Teresa Habberfield, May 23, 2005

Giorgio de Chirico, The enigma of an autumn afternoon, 1909. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2007

TH: What lead you and Dr Fuller to link de Chirico with migraine?

MVG: Chance, really. In discussing de Chirico in general conversation we started to piece together how the apparitions in his memoirs reflect the effects of migraine. Geraint Fuller is my brother in law and we discussed the issue in conversation. As a neurologist, it was he who recognised the images as remeniscent of auras and we pieced it together from there.

TH: In the 1988 article you wrote with Dr Fuller published in the BMJ you cite migraine as artistic inspiration in de Chirico, after giving some examples of scotomata etc. and comparing some of his paintings with entrants in the Migraine Art competition, you sum up by stating that "… de Chirico used these hallucinations as a source for some of the more striking details of his work." In your 1992 PhD thesis you appear to take this further – to tie migraine hallucinations more closely into the heart of his work, especially his "revelation" paintings; and you sum up by stating "…the visual manifestations, now identifiable as migraine scotomata, seem to have been understood as the results of meditation and philosophical initiation". Did you carry out further research and change your views a little during the intervening years, or were you simply arguing the case in a different way?

MVG: Though I have not read either in some time, the shift in emphasis between 1988 and 1992 does not reflect further research, but a rethinking of how de Chirico may have understood the experience.

TH: I am especially interested in the struggle that artists go through to throw off early influences and develop a style that is all their own and, if migraine is in the picture as an inspirational tool, how that is also interleaved into the picture – how much it may contribute to the artist's overall output; how productive the migraine may be.

It is intriguing to me that at a very young age, de Chirico was throwing off the Böcklin type of influence and coming up with something so very different in the art world at that time and also discovering that instead of fighting the illness, he could use it to filter his philosophy, theory, his cultural background and memories through an altered consciousness to perhaps arrive at something rather different than if the migraines were not there. His struggle to find his own art co-incided with his discovery that he could use his illness as a contributing factor (I realise that he either did not know it was migraine or did not admit it). What are your thoughts on this please? How much difference do you think the migraine made to his art? I am mainly interested in his early years, when he started to have the "revelations".

MVG: You state your interest in "the struggle ... to throw off early influences" but I think that this notion has to be historically circumscribed. It was the presumption of the Academic system that still held sway at the end of the nineteenth century (and under which de Chirico was trained in Athens and Munich) that an artist would aspire to be like their master. Of course this was changing but what is striking in de Chirico's case is that the early works which seem to relate to the period of most acute migraine are very Böcklinian in typology; the Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon, as you know, even quotes the Odysseus figure from Böcklin (albeit transformed into a statue). It may be better to state the problem differently: that, for de Chirico at least, the struggle was to extend Böcklin's style for his own times and that that necessarily involved change. When he arrived in Paris, de Chirico seems to have become more acutely aware of the fact that Böcklin was considered unfashionable; it was there that individualism came to the fore and he recognised that he needed a personal style through which to make a mark.

Your use of the term 'filter' for migraine in relation to de Chirico's thinking and culture is interesting and judicious. It seems to me that causality is the difficulty in studying one aspect of an artist's work or make up. Many things came to bear on de Chirico's work, from the fact that he was born 'in exile' (as it were) to the curiously displaced nobility of his family background, from his immersion in Greek mythology and his appreciation of German philosophy. Migraine seems to have been one of these many elements, differing only in its focus on his individual state and experience (in other words it was not something that he could share). I think that he probably did know that he suffered from migraine. That this coincided with accounts of philosophical and mystical revelations among the writers he was studying, may have encouraged him to read that experience in a particular way and to find individual inspiration in it. I suspect, though have not looked into this in depth, that there was also a gendered stigma attached to migraine - that it was considered something (like hysteria) experienced by women and not men.

We must remember that although the theory that de Chirico suffered from migraine seems convincing, it is still a theory. Having said this, if we accept that he suffered from migraine then it is reasonable to understand it as a factor in his art. Any speculation on what his art would have been like without it is intriguing but ultimately pointless.

TH: During our telephone conversation you mentioned a certain resistance by art historians to migraine as inspiration for de Chirico. Did you mean that the evidence of migraine needs to be presented in its correct context, alongside the philosophy, the theory, his cultural background, etc. to present the whole picture properly, otherwise de Chirico's talent and deep philosophical thinking may be negated in the eyes of the art world?

MVG: I do not recall the specific discussion about reluctance among art historians, but I think that the question remains one of causality. In other words, it is simply too reductive to attribute the full complexity of an artist's work - indeed of anyone's personality - to one cause. We are about to see the explosion of the Frida Kahlo experience due to the Tate Modern exhibition (9 June – 9 October 2005), and this is a case in point in which the physical suffering of the artist is simply understood as an explanation of the work. This, it seems to me, diminishes the complex of ingredients that any artist brings to bear in their work.

TH: As far as I know you have only published in the BMJ. Is there any reason why you did not publicise your findings further, and to the art world? Recent books about de Chirico are still saying that he suffered from depression, with no mention of migraine.

MVG: This would have emerged as part of my thesis had I published it as a whole. I hope that this lot helps. I realise the temptation to focus on one things as the answer but I would caution against it.

References

Fuller GN, Gale MV. Migraine aura as artistic inspiration. Br Med J 1988; 297: 1670-1672.
Gale MV. De Chirico: The enigma of fatality. A contextualised interpretation, 1906-1926. PhD diss. Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, 1992.

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