Old-Fashioned

When he was a young fellow, Italy's Giorgio de Chirico (pronounced keerico) was a red-hot surrealist and an inspiration to other radicals of the easel like Salvador Dali. Most of his favorite themes--the melancholy shadows of late afternoon, the animated manikins, the colonnades and lonely figures in otherwise deserted squares--have since become standard surrealist props.

Now a sour and old-fashioned 60, De Chirico loathes surrealism, deplores his own sparkling past. In London last week for an exhibition of his conservative new paintings, he gave a lecture backing up everything that Royal Academician Sir Alfred Munnings had said about modern art the week before (TIME, May 9). Echoed De Chirico:

"The sea which encircles the British Isles and which defended it from the invasions of all its enemies since the time of William the Conqueror has not proved to be a sufficient bulwark to bar the way to this subtle enemy [modern art]." But, he went on, "modernism is dying in all the countries of the world. Let us hope it will soon be just an unhappy memory." At this, one man in the audience broke into loud, if lonely, applause. People turned to see who it was. Sure enough, it was none other than doughty Sir Alfred Munnings himself.

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 . . .'

The 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 to pot.

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