Mystery and Implied Rumble

"Did not William Blake contemn reason and paint the ghost of a flea?"

Erudite Director Alfred Hamilton Barr of Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art once asked this question, writing in the days (1930) when the surrealist movement direly needed an apologist in the U.S. Last fortnight, Barr's Museum acquired one of the most important early surrealist paintings. The picture was 55-year-old Italian Giorgio de Chirico's Delights of the Poet, painted in 1913.

Delights of the Poet is a medium-size canvas representing the haunting mem ory of an Italian town square. The picture seems deserted of humanity, a stage set standing in uneasy expectation of some unsettling occurrence. One white, far-off figure accentuates the loneliness.

De Chirico (pronounced Kirico) was last reported living in Florence. Following his visionary, "enigmatic" period, he produced a series of relatively academic paintings featuring prancing stallions, which an unsympathetic wit once dubbed "neigh plus ultra." During the '20s he quarreled bitterly with the official Paris surrealists, who formally decided that he had died spiritually in 1918.

Born in Greece of Italian parents, Giorgio went to Paris to work in 1911, there got to know Picasso and the poet Apollinaire. During World War I he was called back to Italy for military service. Reportedly he won exemption by claiming mental instability, exhibited his paintings as conclusive proof.

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