Word: chiricos
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...work is rocklike and lumpen totemic. Price's involves an elegant denial of clay's earthen nature. His sharp-angled, cubistic "cup" sculptures look so machined and precise that they might have been conceived in metal; the brilliant visual punch of the industrial glazes in De Chirico's Bathhouse, 1980, accentuated by the thin white lines where the facets of clay meet, gives these tiny objects a mysterious, artificial density...
There was no way whatsoever to avoid the fashions of the architectural compounds, no matter how esoteric they might become. In architecture, intellectual fashion was displayed fifty to a hundred stories high in the cities and in endless de Chirico vistas in the shopping malls of the new American suburbs...
...nouveau-wavo aggressions. "Dumb art," it is conveniently called, and some of it is very dumb indeed-but not all. One notable exception is the work of a precocious 25-year-old named Jedd Garet, whose paintings seem to take their stylistic base from, of all things, late De Chirico- not the pre-1918 master of tailor's dummies and spare, aching urban spaces, but the pompous neoclassicist of the '30s. Coarsely colored and drawn with a kind of savvy crudeness, Caret's Flaming Colossus, 1980, resembles nothing so much as a black squid with humanoid ambitions...
...pessimistic movement. Nobody involved with Neue Sachlichkeit believed in the machine-utopias that were an article of faith among the romantics at the Bauhaus. When an artist like Carl Grossberg (1894-1940) painted factory installations, he gave them a deserted, haunting quality, as though some German De Chirico had been set loose in the Ruhr. De Chirico was the main prototype for the fantastic images of this wing of the German avantgarde; there was, for instance, a ready connection to be made between the tailor's dummies he had painted and the cripples depicted by Grosz or Dix, prosthetic...
...golden light in the bare Hopperian room, wearing nothing but a cigarette. In it, the distances between wall and wall, window and sky, or the lit edge of the curtain and the worn radiant torso, take on something of the strangeness of the space in a good De Chirico. The body is enfolded by its own distances from the world, while planted solidly in a real bedroom. By the same token, the realism of the scene is also an appeal-though a subliminal one-to art history: Jo facing the August light of Truro recalls any number of quattrocento Annunciations...