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But to treat De Chirico solely as a dream-merchant precursor of surrealism does his early work a grave injustice. In his organization of the show, William Rubin contends that De Chirico survives as a painter within a specifically modernist framework, whose standards were generated in the 30 years before 1914 in Paris. That was "the city par excellence of art and the intellect," as De Chirico wrote, where "any man worthy of the name of artist must exact the recognition of his merit." Paris took young De Chirico, as it took young Chagall, and turned him from a naive provincial fabulist into a major painter. His "metaphysical" constructions, such as The Jewish Angel, 1916, certainly influenced Max Ernst. Just as certainly, they came out of the cubist sculpture De Chirico saw all over the Paris studios after 1912. De Chirico is often said to have used Renaissance space in his pictures, but, as Rubin points out, this is a myth. Chirican perspective was not meant to set the viewer in a secure, measurable space. It was a means of distorting the view and disquieting the eye. Instead of one vanishing-point in his architectonic masterpiece, The Melancholy of Departure, 1914, there are six, none "correct." This cloning of viewpoints acts in a way analogous to cubism. It jams the sense of illusionary depth and delivers the surface to the rule of the flat shape, which was the quintessential modernist strategy. In color, in tonal structure, and in its contradictory lighting, Rubin argues, De Chirico's style up to 1918 "was as alien to its supposed classical, 15th century models as it was dependent on the Parisian painting of its own moment." This view of De Chirico as formalist fits all the evidence, and rids the artist of a great deal of accumulated "poetic" waffle. It also helps one to distinguish, in a way that makes sense, between De Chirico's real achievements and the long slide into mediocrity after 1918. Authentic pre-1918 De Chiricos are few, and most of them are on the MOMA'S walls. On the other hand, copies and "later" versions—a euphemism for self-forgeries—are everywhere. (One of them, from the Cleveland Museum of Art, dubiously identified as a 1917 Metaphysical Interior, has crept into the show and should creep out.) Italian art dealers used to say the maestro's bed was six feet off the ground, to hold all the "early work" he kept "discovering" beneath it. In a spirit of pardonable malice, Rubin reprints in the catalogue 18 versions of
The Disquieting Muses, 1917, all done between 1945 and 1962. Many of these facsimiles, backdated, were sold as original pittura metafisica.