Word: chiricos
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Italy's Giorgio de Chirico is the grandpa of a lot of enigmatic modern painting. His empty squares, staring arcades and twisted mannikins have become the common stage properties of surrealism. But De Chirico himself long ago abandoned surrealism for candy-box neoclassicism. So when Turin's Fiat motor corporation wanted to celebrate its golden anniversary, De Chirico seemed just the man to help out with a portrait of the 1950 Fiat...
...Chirico's fee was his model, worth $2,145. In ten days he dashed off a picture in which Pegasus, led by a hero in a floating red robe, descends to snort at a gleaming new blue Fiat. Above it, like a vision in the pearly clouds, appears the first Fiat, produced 50 years...
Foreshadowings. The exhibition went back to Futurists like Boccioni, included two of his more famous contemporaries who had followed highly individual paths of their own. One of them, Giorgio de Chirico (who has since become a crusty academician-TIME, May 16), was represented by some of his striking early work foreshadowing the Surrealists. The other was Amedeo Modigliani, a much-loved, short-lived alcoholic who was at his best painting tender nudes and portraits based on African sculpture...
Next day, De Chirico's own paintings came in for some hard words. "The new De Chirico," said the Manchester Guardian, "is evidently a great admirer of Rubens. The knights in armor, the nudes and most of the landscape backgrounds appear to derive from that artist . . . but the overemphatic drawing, the heavy black shadows, the rather meaningless color are very different...
...lesson seemed obvious: in art, as elsewhere, imitation is dull sport. The hundreds of suckling surrealists who had aped De Chirico's youthful work had accomplished very little. And when De Chirico himself took to imitating Rubens, and other long-dead masters, such as 17th Century Romantic Salvator Rosa, his own highly personal painting went...