Word: chiricos
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...case of Giorgio de Chirico is one of the most curious in art history. An Italian, born in 1888 and raised partly in Greece-where his father, an engineer, planned and built railroads-he led a long, productive life, almost Picassian in length; he died in 1978. He had studied in Munich, and in his early 20s, under the spell of a symbolist painter named Arnold Böcklin, he began to produce a series of strange, oneiric cityscapes. When they were seen in Paris after 1911, they were ecstatically hailed by painters and poets from Picasso to Paul Eluard...
This phase of his work-the so-called pittura metafisica-lasted until about 1918. Thereafter, De Chirico changed. He wanted to become, and almost succeeded in becoming, a classicist. He imagined himself to be the heir of Titian. Rejected by the French avantgarde, he struck back with disputatious critiques of modernist degeneracy; for the next 60 years of his life, he remained an obdurate though not very skillful academic painter. He even took to signing his work Pictor Optimus (the best painter). The sheer scale of his failure-if that is the word for it-is almost as fascinating...
Organized by William Rubin, MOMA's director of painting and sculpture, "De Chirico"-75 paintings and 20 drawings on view until June 29-is the successor to the museum's retrospectives of Cezanne and Picasso. That is to say, it is a curatorial triumph, supported by a catalogue that surely will become a standard text on the artist. And his paintings-not incidentally-are of ravishing beauty. For the past 70 years, De Chirico's city has been one of the capitals of the modernist imagination. It is a fantasy town, a state of mind, signifying alienation...
Many of its traits are drawn from real places in which De Chirico lived. Volos, the Greek town where he grew up, was bisected by a railway, and the glimpse of a train among the houses-which look so strange in De Chirico's paintings-must have been a fact of his childhood memory. But the richest sources of imagery were Turin, which De Chirico visited briefly as a young man, and Ferrara, where he lived from 1915 to 1918. Turin's towers, including the eccentric 19th century Mole Antonelliana, regularly appear in his paintings. Another favorite site...
...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...