Word: chiricos
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...Table), 1972, is played down almost to silence; none of the spidery, wandering and quirkish line of his graphic work survives in it. Object answers object, bowl to lamp shade to vase of tulips, across an expanse of plate glass that seems as large and expectant as a De Chirico piazza. Everything is given extreme distinctness but deprived of weight, and the effect is decidedly eerie...
...What De Chirico's work from 1911 to 1918 brilliantly performs is an archaeology of the self. Images rise from childhood memory with a peculiar, disconnected intensity; they are fragments of a lost life, like sculpture found in the rubble of an ancient city. "If a work of art is to be truly immortal," he proclaimed, "it must pass quite beyond the limits of the human world, without any sign of common sense or logic. In this way the work will draw nearer to dream and to the mind of a child...
Unchanged Light. De Chirico's empty squares and silent towers seem at first to be conceived as a partial homage to the Italian Renaissance. It is a windless, ideal space where the light never changes and shadows do not move. Human figures are either distant specks or huge, sculptural presences-bronze father figures on plinths, reclining "classical" marbles or faceless wooden dummies. But this world has none of the solidity of Renaissance townscape. Instead, it is enigmatic and spectral; the perspectives tilt irrationally and contradict one another, the façades are cardboard, the inhabitants ghosts. "These characters...
Sheer Will. Ironically, the decline set in when De Chirico resolved to be a Great Artist in the traditional, Italian sense of the word. "I have been tormented by one problem for almost three years now-the problem of craftsmanship," he wrote to Breton in 1922. The gulf between the early work and De Chirico's St. George Killing the Dragon, 1940, can only be explained in terms of this problem. St. George, with its glutinous, worried paint, its muddily incoherent color and its torpid drawing, would hardly pass as a student academy piece; it is recognizable, though only...
...dream of antiquity becomes concrete in De Chirico's later work, and all his efforts are posited on the belief that somehow it can be given life -if not by talent, then by sheer will. De Chirico's self-magniloquent portraits in armor and 17th century lace are not simply costume pieces, but efforts to inhabit the dream and be a one-man Renaissance. His interminable pairs of Bambi-eyed horses prancing on a marble-littered beach have the same intention. The sum effect is, inevitably, absurd: for De Chirico has no more talent for illusionism than...