Word: chiricos
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...same way, Chia alludes to De Chirico (not the prewar master of strange, oneiric cityscapes, but the De Chirico of the 1930s, with his kitschy antique pretensions) and, more reconditely, to the paintings of De Chirico's brother, who took the name Alberto Savinio. With tongue in cheek, Chia has assembled a whole secondhand wardrobe of classical nostalgia: a painting like Figures with Flag and Flute, 1983, with its bearded sage listening to the pipings of a young musician amid the rubble of some temple, thus manages to be both knowing and undemanding. It evokes complicity; artist and viewer...
This is Italian family month in New York museums. First, the Museum of Modern Art's great retrospective of Giorgio de Chirico to fix the paternity, or some of it, and now the offspring, or some of them, at the Guggenheim Museum. "Italian Art Now: An American Perspective" is the latest in the Guggenheim's discursive series of "sample shows" of the current art of different nations. It covers the work of seven artists: three painters (Sandro Chia, Enzo Cucchi, Nino Longobardi), two sculptors (Giuseppe Penone and Gilberto Zorio) and two conceptual/per formance artists (Luigi Ontani and Vettor...
...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...
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...
...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...