Word: chiricos
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Time after time, De Chirico publicly labeled works signed with his name as spurious and got them "sequestered"-a legal action whereby police seize a painting until a court can judge its authenticity...
...ghostly landscapes and empty plazas that Giorgio De Chirico painted in the decade before 1920 rank the Italian artist as the most influential forerunner of surrealism. In the late '20s his paintings were so much in demand that he secretly took to selling them himself, circumventing an exclusive contract with a Paris dealer. The dealer promptly retaliated by selling De Chiricos so cheap that the artist swore lifelong vengeance on all art dealers as unscrupulous leeches...
After a painful self-examination. De Chirico emerged in 1930, at the age of 41, with a radical change of style: a neoclassic Rubens-like technique featuring long-maned nudes, long-maned horses, knights in armor, and a series of self-portraits, some clothed in fancy dress and some in flabby flesh. To the artist's bitter dismay, his one-man revolution, aimed at the "horrible bestiality called modern art," failed to spark a following. Cognoscenti shunned the new technique and subject matter; De Chirico stubbornly stuck to his anachronistic style...
Wonderfully Disgraceful. The newest De Chirico malediction involved Milan's respected Brera Galleria, which last week put up for sale 248 examples of modern art that included six De Chiricos, two of them in his metaphysical style. Strolling through the exhibit before the sale, white-thatched De Chirico, now 72. was spotted by an attendant who asked: "Maestro, if you were on a sinking ship with these six paintings, vhich one would you save?" "I'd save them all," replied the maestro, and promptly went about "saving...
...only authentic thing about it, said De Chirico, was the signature; he insisted that the rest of it had been overpainted on one of his neoclassic efforts by some art faker...