Word: chiricos
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...living artist enjoys a more bizarre reputation than the Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico. Up to 1918, he turned out a body of work that set him firmly among the masters of European modernism. His "mysterious objects," moonstruck piazzas and tilting, empty colonnades fascinated the Surrealists and became one of the inspirations of their movement. René Magritte and Salvador Dali were both De Chirico's debtors; Yves Tanguy resolved to be a painter only after seeing an early De Chirico in a dealer's window in 1923. André Breton, the pope of Surrealism, hailed...
...other hand, very little of it has been shown outside Italy. So the chance existed that a gross injustice had been done to the mature work of a gifted painter; in 1918, after all, De Chirico was only 30, and he has kept working ever since, denying that he ever was a modern artist and grumpily insisting that the Surrealists totally misunderstood him and his work. To present the evidence, the New York Cultural Center has assembled a retrospective of some 180 paintings, drawings, lithographs and bronzes, nearly all from De Chirico's own collection, spanning six decades from...
...obsessions of child hood memory permeated De Chirico's work, and his childhood with its Levantine eccentricities might have come from Durrell's Alexandria Quartet. The son of a peripatetic Sicilian engineer, a man of fiery temperament much given to dueling, De Chirico was born in Greece and constantly moved house. "In my life," he observed in a memoir, "there is some thing fatal which makes me change addresses." The character of these years - a melancholic idyll of transience, conducted in a series of sirocco-damp villas across a classical landscape - is built into his early paintings...
...secondary to Rockefeller. "My enjoyment of art," he says, "is more an esthetic than an intellectual reaction." This leads him to favor Cubists over Surrealists, color-field painters over pop. Yet he is not doctrinaire about his preferences for schools, and his collection includes George Segal and Giorgio de Chirico's Song of Love...
Stepping from the control house into East Berlin itself is a little like stepping into a de Chirico painting. There is an atmosphere of oppression which cannot adequately be depicted by sketching the physical ruin of the city. The number of people on the street drops, the number of automobiles is cut to about a quarter the number in the West, there are empty kiosks, banners ("The State Needs Everyone; Everyone Needs the State"), and wall-murals of workers, farmers, and technicians marching forward under the banner of the German Democratic Republic...