The same year, Andrea set out on his own, moving to Paris, France an epicenter of activity for the European avant-garde and modernist movements.
While living in Paris, Andrea also became acquainted with a range of writers and artists such as Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Max Jacob, and Fernand Léger.
[1] In 1914, largely in an effort to differentiate himself from his increasingly famous artist-brother, Giorgio de Chirico, Andrea adopted the penname Alberto Savinio.
That year also saw the publication of Les Chants de la mi-mort (The Songs of Half-Death), a dramatic poem including original illustrations and a piano suite accompaniment, both also created by Savinio.
Les Chants de la mi-mort dealt largely with the concept of sleep (interpretatively referred to as "The Half Death") and was filled with odd, mechanical toy-like characters.
[3][1][4] Shortly after the outbreak of World War I, Savinio and his brother returned to Italy in order to enlist in the Italian army.
This group of three, under the influence of Giovanni Papini, then proceeded to found the artistic movement Scuola Metafisica (Metaphysical Painting).
While stationed there, Savinio gained the chance to rediscover his childhood play-world of Greece, and the influence can be seen in his first published novel, Hermaphrodito.
Hermaphrodito was published in 1918, and like Les Chants de la mi-mort, was a multilingual piece, intertwining languages as well as prose and poetry.
[5] In 1920, he completed Tragedia dell'infanzia (Tragedy of Childhood), a primarily autobiographical collection of episodes illuminating the disconnect between the adult and juvenile experience and perception of the world.
Set in 1910 Paris, the novel tells the story of the protagonist-narrator, who is apparently renting a room from a typical bourgeois house, which Savinio describes as being "inhabited by Ghosts".
Savinio's contributions to the Avant-Garde movement during this period sharply contrast with the provincialism that was favored by the National Fascist Party in Italy at this time.
The novel tells the story of Angelica, a poor actress working in a second rate theater in Greece at the end of the nineteenth-century and Baron Felix von Rothspeer, a loveless, older aristocrat.
In many ways, Savinio makes the theater a central character in the plot; it is painted as a place where the senses and romance can be deeply explored and discovered.
Savinio completed his fifth and final opera, conceived for the radio, Cristoforo Colombo, shortly before his death on 5 May 1952 in Rome, Italy.
[1][2][4][6] The penname "Alberto Savinio" was an Italianization of Albert Savine, a minor French writer and translator of Oscar Wilde and Thomas De Quincey.
[1]Early in their lives, Andrea and his brother Giorgio were nearly inseparable, even referring to themselves as Castor and Pollux, the warrior twins.
Guillaume Apollinaire said of it: I was surprised and beguiled; Savinio mistreated his instrument so much that after each piece the keyboard had to be cleared of chips and splinters.
[6]Judgment of his body of work as a whole was seen in 1954, when the Venice Biennale created a room devoted solely to Savinio's artistic legacy.
[7] According to the art historian Jean Clair, the works of Savinio and his brother Giorgio de Chirico were the basis of both the surrealist movement and magic realism.