Word: pittura
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There was, however, nothing particularly revolutionary about his paintings. Seeking a credible genius costume, he did versions of Cubism, of De Chirico's pittura metafisica, and developed his dry, classicizing realism in such images as Seated Girl Seen from the Back, 1925. It is an easy matter to go through this early work identifying, here and there, what would grow and what would not: how the taste for smoothly curved profile and deep black relief that he got from Amedee Ozenfant's decorative Cubism, for instance, turned into Dali's later fondness for writhing, spookily dark shadows cast by figures...
...Thus La Pittura Colta: the revenge of late De Chirico on modernism. A decade ago, nobody wanted the historicist kitsch that Giorgio de Chirico, the master of metaphysical painting who became the laureate of Fascist taste, produced after 1925. Today his work goes for big prices and is assiduously promoted. It is therefore not surprising that the Biennale should devote several rooms to him. However, the qualities of La Pittura Colta go far beyond, or below, De Chirico's fussy homages to Rubens, Titian or Fragonard. Its exponents, such as Carlo Maria Mariani, Stefano di Stasio or Omar Galliani...
...classicism of La Pittura Colta is a mere shell, and its vaunted erudition is as thin as a museum postcard. All it retains from the beaux-arts tradition is the desire to get the highlight on the Spartan's backside right-not that it always does so. It has the calm not of classical elevation but of exhausted decadence. The Venetian setting is unfair to it, for anyone can take the water-bus back to the Scuola di San Rocco and see what Tintoretto could do with the human figure. The right place for it is Las Vegas, among...
This phase of his work-the so-called pittura metafisica-lasted until about 1918. Thereafter, De Chirico changed. He wanted to 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...
...Disquieting Muses, 1917, all done between 1945 and 1962. Many of these facsimiles, backdated, were sold as original pittura metafisica...