MOMA reclaims his early brilliance from the polemical dust
The case of Giorgio de Chirico is one of the most curious in art history. An Italian, born in 1888 and raised partly in Greece—where his father, an engineer, planned and built railroads—he led a long, productive life, almost Picassian in length; he died in 1978. He had studied in Munich, and in his early 20s, under the spell of a symbolist painter named Arnold Böcklin, he began to produce a series of strange, oneiric cityscapes. When they were seen in Paris after 1911, they were ecstatically hailed by painters and poets from Picasso to Paul Eluard; before long De Chirico became one of the heroes of surrealism.
This phase of his work—the so-called pittura metafisica—lasted until about 1918. Thereafter, De Chirico changed. He wanted to become, and almost succeeded in becoming, a classicist. He imagined himself to be the heir of Titian. Rejected by the French avantgarde, he struck back with disputatious critiques of modernist degeneracy; for the next 60 years of his life, he remained an obdurate though not very skillful academic painter. He even took to signing his work Pictor Optimus (the best painter). The sheer scale of his failure—if that is the word for it—is almost as fascinating as the brilliance of his early talent. Naturally, a great deal of both has been hidden by the polemical dust, and last week New York's Museum of Modern Art unveiled its effort to stabilize and make sense of De Chirico's reputation.
Organized by William Rubin, MOMA's director of painting and sculpture, "De Chirico"—75 paintings and 20 drawings on view until June 29—is the successor to the museum's retrospectives of Cezanne and Picasso. That is to say, it is a curatorial triumph, supported by a catalogue that surely will become a standard text on the artist. And his paintings—not incidentally—are of ravishing beauty. For the past 70 years, De Chirico's city has been one of the capitals of the modernist imagination. It is a fantasy town, a state of mind, signifying alienation, dreaming and loss. Its elements are so well known by now that they fall into place as soon as they are named, like jigsaw pieces worn by being assembled over and over again: the arcades, the tower, the piazza, the shadows, the statue, the train, the mannequin.
Many of its traits are drawn from real places in which De Chirico lived. Volos, the Greek town where he grew up, was bisected by a railway, and the glimpse of a train among the houses—which look so strange in De Chirico's paintings—must have been a fact of his childhood memory. But the richest sources of imagery were Turin, which De Chirico visited briefly as a young man, and Ferrara, where he lived from 1915 to 1918. Turin's towers, including the eccentric 19th century Mole Antonelliana, regularly appear in his paintings. Another favorite site, Turin's Piazza Vittorio Veneto, is surrounded on three sides by plain, deep-shadowed arcades; these serried slots of darkness are the obsessive motif of De Chirico's cityscape. He may have grasped their poetic opportunities through looking at Böcklin's paintings of Italian arcades, but no painter ever made an architectural feature more his own.