Word: chiricos
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...this show begins, found itself in a fix under the immense shadow of its own cultural history. Either it made a diverting Oedipal commotion about the loathsome oppressiveness of the past, like the futurists, or immersed itself in poignant reveries about its authoritarian and alienating beauty, like Giorgio de Chirico and his associates in metaphysical painting...
...Balla was the best painter associated with Futurism, the idea of metaphysical painting is all but synonymous with De Chirico. Just as futurist cells sprang up all over the world, and futurism was for most people synonymous with modern art up to at least 1925, so De Chirico's dreaming, spatially deceitful piazzas and arcades, with their phallic locomotives and long-shadowed statues, had an immense resonance both inside and outside Italy. Their influence on surrealism was crucial, but their reveries about past and present, nature and culture, memory and desire also hover behind much Italian art from...
...Royal Academy show includes quite a lot of De Chirico's more debatable pseudoclassical work from the '20s -- this is now de rigueur, thanks to its popularity among postmodernists, who see it as a daring and prophetic form of backwardness -- as well as the paintings of his hardly less talented brother, the painter-composer-dram atist who worked under the name of Alberto Savinio and turned the late scheme of metaphysical painting into an even wilder pastiche than it had already become...
...many leading artists and intellectuals. The Fascist rhetoric of dynamism and machine efficiency meshed with (and was partly inspired by) that of futurism; while the Duce's promise of a renewed empire, a "third Rome" that would replay the Augustan past, had immediate appeal to nostalgists like De Chirico, Carra and even Giorgio Morandi...
...been thought heroic in scale. In fact, there is less scale in such work than brute size. To see what the scale of an image can mean in terms of real address to the eye, one must go a few rooms back and look, once more, at early De Chirico and Sironi...