(4 of 4)
What made him do it? In part, revenge; if modernist critics and the collectors they influenced were going to make capital from his youth while insulting his maturity, then let them eat fake. Why should he not profit from the fact that early De Chiricos fetched ten or 20 times the price of late ones? He believed he got better as he got older. He would have had to be a saint of humility not to think so. The worst insult you can offer an artist is to tell him how good he used to be. No wonder De Chirico rejected everything that was written about his early work and refused to agree that it had any fundamental connection with modernism. Only thus could he rationalize his belief that he was the same artist after 1918 as before: the difference between him and other members of that stupendous generation of the 1880s being that he alone had stepped out into the light of classicism, leaving Picasso and the rest behind in their "primitive" darkness and willful modernist regression.
A constant theme of De Chirico's early work is the loss of his father, the rail road engineer commemorated in those white statues, phallic smokestacks, cannons, towers and trains. Perhaps he consoled himself by embracing the most paternal of all styles — the ultimate authority of Graeco-Roman archaeology as transmitted by the Renaissance, a classicism one could only approach from outside.
Waking this sleeping father became an other obsessive project: after 1920 De Chirico is always quoting classical models, allegories, iconographies. The one thing he could not do was paint with the mesure and certainty appropriate to classical art.
He could invoke, but never convincingly evoke, that great still frame of agreement.
Consequently his paintings after 1920 teeter on the edge of an absurd defensiveness; they mean less than they seem to. They are not about nostalgia, as the early work was. They are nostalgic, and flatly so.
Just at the moment, determined efforts are being made — though not by MOMA — to rehabilitate late DeChirico. Dealers need product, of course, but there is more to it than that. De Chirico's queer, starved re— lationship to the classical past closely resembles the way many young | painters now look back on the prime I energies of modern art; his "post-classicism," unconsciously camp, is uncle to the pastiches of "post-modernism." Of course, that does not make the late paintings much more interesting; they are still not bad enough to look good. The Pictor Optimus could only stump about like a man at a masquerade, tangled in the mantle of Titian. The De Chirico this show gives back to us was so much less encumbered, so precise and knowing in his hard-won awkwardness . —By Robert Hughes