Word: chiricos
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...real gifts lay from the orthodox processes of modernism. Nor did his first essays in the surrealist manner, done in 1925-26, indicate much about the artist to come; they are, for the most part, grab bags of motifs from other painters, chiefly Ernst and Giorgio de Chirico...
Between 1912 and 1920, De Chirico produced a series of images?his pittura metafisica, or metaphysical painting?that altered the history of modernism. His empty colonnades and squares, populated by statues and shadows, exerted a vast influence on the growth of a specifically surrealist art. Max Ernst, René Magritte and Salvador Dali all paid homage to the liberating power of early De Chirico. He seemed to have made the actions of the dreaming mind more accessible, vivid and poignant than any other painter. "If a work of art is to be truly immortal," he explained, "it must pass quite beyond...
...stage of De Chirico's early paintings, two cultures met. One was the "classical" Mediterranean culture that dominated his boyhood memories. Born in Greece, the son of a peripatetic Sicilian railroad engineer, De Chirico knew it well: the ocher walls of provincial towns, the neglected public gardens, the statuary and antique rubble. On the other hand, modernity was constantly thrusting its emblems into this dream: trains, clocks, surveyors' instruments, rulers, protractors. From this collision between mythic time and measured time, an extraordinary poignancy arose; and the best of these early De Chiricos have not dated...
Unfortunately, De Chirico had nei ther the technical proficiency nor the mastery of drawing to reach his declared goal: a delayed place in the Renaissance tradition. His mythological scenes, in imitation of Titian, were leaden and vacuous; his nudes, meant to emulate Rubens, had the consistency of overboiled gnocchi; homage kept turning into parody. In the meantime De Chirico railed furiously at the modern movement; Braque and Matisse were "malodorous" and surrealism was a brainless obscenity...
...when collectors refused to touch his current work but scrambled for any pre-1920 De Chirico, he began to repeat his own early work. The market for De Chiricos became hopelessly snarled in disputes over authenticity, between fake De Chiricos painted by others, the copies he painted himself, and the real pre-1920 canvases. He took a sardonic relish in that. It was his revenge on an art world that he regarded as corrupt from first to last. Nevertheless, nothing would stop him from painting. He was, at the last, a model of misapplied industry. But the young De Chirico...