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That De Chirico was a poet, and a great one, is not in dispute. He could condense voluminous feeling through metaphor and association. One can try to dissect these magical nodes of experience, yet not find what makes them cohere.
In The Joy of Return, 1915, De Chirico's train has once more entered the city; its black silhouette is plumb in the center of the looming gray facades; a bright ball of vapor hovers directly above its smokestack. Perhaps it comes from the train and is near us. Or possibly it is a cloud on the horizon, lit by the sun that never penetrates the buildings, in the last electric-blue silence of dusk. It contracts the near and the far, enchanting one's sense of space. The early De Chiricos are full of such effects. Et quid amabo nisi quodaenigma es/?(What shall I love if not the enigma?)—this question, inscribed by the young artist on his self-portrait in 1911, is their subtext.
Morbid, introspective and peevish, De Chirico belonged to the company of the great convalescents: Cavafy, Leopardi, Proust. The city was his sanatorium and, as a fabricator of images that spoke of frustration, tension and ritualized memory, he had no equal. No wonder the surrealists adored his early work and adopted its strategies wholesale. The "illusionist" painters among them, Dali, Ernst, Tanguy and Magritte, all came out of early De Chirico, a lineage astutely discussed by Laura Rosenstock in the catalogue; and as another contributor, Wieland Schmied, points out, German painters in the '20s like George Grosz used Chirican motifs to express their vision of an estranged urban world in social dislocation.