Word: painterly
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...Italian, born in 1888 and raised partly in Greece-where his father, an engineer, planned and built railroads-he led a long, productive life, almost Picassian in length; he died in 1978. He had studied in Munich, and in his early 20s, under the spell of a symbolist painter named Arnold Böcklin, he began to produce a series of strange, oneiric cityscapes. When they were seen in Paris after 1911, they were ecstatically hailed by painters and poets from Picasso to Paul Eluard; before long De Chirico became one of the heroes of surrealism...
...become, and almost succeeded in becoming, a classicist. He imagined himself to be the heir of Titian. Rejected by the French avantgarde, he struck back with disputatious critiques of modernist degeneracy; for the next 60 years of his life, he remained an obdurate though not very skillful academic painter. He even took to signing his work Pictor Optimus (the best painter). The sheer scale of his failure-if that is the word for it-is almost as fascinating as the brilliance of his early talent. Naturally, a great deal of both has been hidden by the polemical dust, and last...
...Piazza Vittorio Veneto, is surrounded on three sides by plain, deep-shadowed arcades; these serried slots of darkness are the obsessive motif of De Chirico's cityscape. He may have grasped their poetic opportunities through looking at Böcklin's paintings of Italian arcades, but no painter ever made an architectural feature more...
...treat De Chirico solely as a dream-merchant precursor of surrealism does his early work a grave injustice. In his organization of the show, William Rubin contends that De Chirico survives as a painter within a specifically modernist framework, whose standards were generated in the 30 years before 1914 in Paris. That was "the city par excellence of art and the intellect," as De Chirico wrote, where "any man worthy of the name of artist must exact the recognition of his merit." Paris took young De Chirico, as it took young Chagall, and turned him from a naive provincial fabulist...
Ruisdael was not an on-the-spot painter. His landscapes are "composites," made up in the studio from sketches, memory and imagination; there is no finding the spot where Ruisdael "really" stood on the shore of the IJ. Some places he painted without seeing them at all. The Dutch market, in the late 1650s, had a vogue for Scandinavian waterfalls; Ruisdael obligingly painted about a hundred of them, undeterred by the fact that he had never been north of Holland. His Haarlempjes, or "Views of Haarlem," were also bread and butter; their usual format is one of the best-loved...