At the age of 21, Giorgio de Chirico (1888 - 1978) had a metaphysical awareness, which he summed up as follows: "Zarathustra has arrived". Zarathustra, a poet-prophet figure animated by Nietzsche in his writings, marks the painter who then laid the foundations of his metaphysical art. Originally from Greece, having studied at a very early age at the Fine Arts School in Athens and then in Munich, trained in the melting pot of classical culture and late German Romanticism, the young man arrived in Paris in 1911. There he developed his metaphysical painting. While maintaining a figurative language, de Chirico seeks to represent what is beyond the appearance of reality and the experience of the senses. Following in the footsteps of Nietzsche and Rimbaud, he seeks to abolish meaning in art. His scenes are enigmatic but rendered with realism, bathed in a haunting atmosphere that shows all the ambivalence created to depict something else. Apollinaire soon discovers it, Paul Guillaume sells it, and this is why, quite naturally, this exhibition is set up at the Musée de l'Orangerie. Replacing Chirico's work among the artists and collectors that he frequented at the time, it allows us to discover this major aspect of his work. After Paris, this exhibition, organized by the Musée d'Orsay and the Musée de l'Orangerie, will be presented at the Hamburger Kunsthalle in Hamburg.