The Enigmas of De Chirico

By ROBERT HUGHES

MOMA reclaims his early brilliance from the polemical dust

The case of Giorgio de Chirico is one of the most curious in art history. An 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 Boecklin, 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.

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 as the brilliance of his early talent. Naturally, a great deal of both has been hidden by the polemical dust, and last week New York's Museum of Modern Art unveiled its effort to stabilize and make sense of De Chirico's reputation.

Organized by William Rubin, MOMA's director of painting and sculpture, "De Chirico"--75 paintings and 20 drawings on view until June 29--is the successor to the museum's retrospectives of Cezanne and Picasso. That is to say, it is a curatorial triumph, supported by a catalogue that surely will become a standard text on the artist. And his paintings--not incidentally--are of ravishing beauty. For the past 70 years, De Chirico's city has been one of the capitals of the modernist imagination. It is a fantasy town, a state of mind, signifying alienation, dreaming and loss. Its elements are so well known by now that they fall into place as soon as they are named, like jigsaw pieces worn by being assembled over and over again: the arcades, the tower, the piazza, the shadows, the statue, the train, the mannequin.

Many of its traits are drawn from real places in which De Chirico lived. Volos, the Greek town where he grew up, was bisected by a railway, and the glimpse of a train among the houses--which look so strange in De Chirico's paintings--must have been a fact of his childhood memory. But the richest sources of imagery were Turin, which De Chirico visited briefly as a young man, and Ferrara, where he lived from 1915 to 1918. Turin's towers, including the eccentric 19th century Mole Antonelliana, regularly appear in his paintings. Another favorite site, Turin's 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 Boecklin's paintings of Italian arcades, but no painter ever made an architectural feature more his own.

That De Chirico was a poet, and a great one, is not in dispute. He could condense voluminous feeling through metaphor and association. One can try to dissect these magical nodes of experience, yet not find what makes them cohere.

In The Joy of Return, 1915, De Chirico's train has once more entered the city; its black silhouette is plumb in the center of the looming gray facades; a bright ball of vapor hovers directly above its smokestack. Perhaps it comes from the train and is near us. Or possibly it is a cloud on the horizon, lit by the sun that never penetrates the buildings, in the last electric-blue silence of dusk. It contracts the near and the far, enchanting one's sense of space. The early De Chiricos are full of such effects. Et quid amabo nisi quodaenigma es/?(What shall I love if not the enigma?)--this question, inscribed by the young artist on his self-portrait in 1911, is their subtext.

Morbid, introspective and peevish, De Chirico belonged to the company of the great convalescents: Cavafy, Leopardi, Proust. The city was his sanatorium and, as a fabricator of images that spoke of frustration, tension and ritualized memory, he had no equal. No wonder the surrealists adored his early work and adopted its strategies wholesale. The "illusionist" painters among them, Dali, Ernst, Tanguy and Magritte, all came out of early De Chirico, a lineage astutely discussed by Laura Rosenstock in the catalogue; and as another contributor, Wieland Schmied, points out, German painters in the '20s like George Grosz used Chirican motifs to express their vision of an estranged urban world in social dislocation.

But to 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 into a major painter. His "metaphysical" constructions, such as The Jewish Angel, 1916, certainly influenced Max Ernst. Just as certainly, they came out of the cubist sculpture De Chirico saw all over the Paris studios after 1912. De Chirico is often said to have used Renaissance space in his pictures, but, as Rubin points out, this is a myth. Chirican perspective was not meant to set the viewer in a secure, measurable space. It was a means of distorting the view and disquieting the eye. Instead of one vanishing-point in his architectonic masterpiece, The Melancholy of Departure, 1914, there are six, none "correct." This cloning of viewpoints acts in a way analogous to cubism. It jams the sense of illusionary depth and delivers the surface to the rule of the flat shape, which was the quintessential modernist strategy. In color, in tonal structure, and in its contradictory lighting, Rubin argues, De Chirico's style up to 1918 "was as alien to its supposed classical, 15th century models as it was dependent on the Parisian painting of its own moment." This view of De Chirico as formalist fits all the evidence, and rids the artist of a great deal of accumulated "poetic" waffle. It also helps one to distinguish, in a way that makes sense, between De Chirico's real achievements and the long slide into mediocrity after 1918. Authentic pre-1918 De Chiricos are few, and most of them are on the MOMA'S walls. On the other hand, copies and "later" versions--a euphemism for self-forgeries--are everywhere. (One of them, from the Cleveland Museum of Art, dubiously identified as a 1917 Metaphysical Interior, has crept into the show and should creep out.) Italian art dealers used to say the maestro's bed was six feet off the ground, to hold all the "early work" he kept "discovering" beneath it. In a spirit of pardonable malice, Rubin reprints in the catalogue 18 versions of

The Disquieting Muses, 1917, all done between 1945 and 1962. Many of these facsimiles, backdated, were sold as original pittura metafisica.

What made him do it? In part, revenge; if modernist critics and the collectors they influenced were going to make capital from his youth while insulting his maturity, then let them eat fake. Why should he not profit from the fact that early De Chiricos fetched ten or 20 times the price of late ones? He believed he got better as he got older. He would have had to be a saint of humility not to think so. The worst insult you can offer an artist is to tell him how good he used to be. No wonder De Chirico rejected everything that was written about his early work and refused to agree that it had any fundamental connection with modernism. Only thus could he rationalize his belief that he was the same artist after 1918 as before: the difference between him and other members of that stupendous generation of the 1880s being that he alone had stepped out into the light of classicism, leaving Picasso and the rest behind in their "primitive" darkness and willful modernist regression.

A constant theme of De Chirico's early work is the loss of his father, the rail road engineer commemorated in those white statues, phallic smokestacks, cannons, towers and trains. Perhaps he consoled himself by embracing the most paternal of all styles -- the ultimate authority of Graeco-Roman archaeology as transmitted by the Renaissance, a classicism one could only approach from outside.

Waking this sleeping father became an other obsessive project: after 1920 De Chirico is always quoting classical models, allegories, iconographies. The one thing he could not do was paint with the mesure and certainty appropriate to classical art.

He could invoke, but never convincingly evoke, that great still frame of agreement.

Consequently his paintings after 1920 teeter on the edge of an absurd defensiveness; they mean less than they seem to. They are not about nostalgia, as the early work was. They are nostalgic, and flatly so.

Just at the moment, determined efforts are being made -- though not by MOMA -- to rehabilitate late DeChirico. Dealers need product, of course, but there is more to it than that. De Chirico's queer, starved re-- lationship to the classical past closely resembles the way many young | painters now look back on the prime I energies of modern art; his "post-classicism," unconsciously camp, is uncle to the pastiches of "post-modernism." Of course, that does not make the late paintings much more interesting; they are still not bad enough to look good. The Pictor Optimus could only stump about like a man at a masquerade, tangled in the mantle of Titian. The De Chirico this show gives back to us was so much less encumbered, so precise and knowing in his hard-won awkwardness . --By Robert Hughes

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