Abstract
This article focuses on the relationship between Giorgio de Chirico's artwork and American criticism. It starts from the distorted and misrepresented view created by André Breton (and widely disseminated in the USA especially through James Thrall Soby's exhibitions and books) of an ‘early’ de Chirico, a leading painter of international art until 1917–1918, and a ‘late’ de Chirico, artistically doomed from 1919 until 1978, the year of his death. As an early indication of a more correct interpretation, I have focused on the great de Chirico exhibition held at the New York Cultural Center in 1972 that featured works ranging from 1911 to the early 1970s. Despite many negative reviews from American critics, still bound by modernist stereotypes, the exhibition was highly appreciated by major American artists such as Philip Guston and was the first spark of a dialogue between de Chirico and Warhol destined to yield important results in the ‘After de Chirico’ exhibition in 1982. The article then analyses the new climate that, since the 1980s, has fostered a proper reappraisal of de Chirico's entire oeuvre also in the USA, through a series of exhibitions, essays and articles up to 2023, finally dispelling the cliché of the ‘late’ de Chirico.
Keywords
Background
In 1971, Donald H Karshan, a prominent American art critic, invited Giorgio de Chirico to hold a major exhibition at the New York Cultural Center, a museum where Karshan had already organized exhibitions on conceptual art, on Bernar Venet's conceptual years (1966–1970), on the British avant-garde and on the Swiss avant-garde (Melvin, 2016).
For de Chirico, it was a throwback to when, between 1936 and 1938, he moved to the USA to hold successful exhibitions in galleries such as Julien Levy's (Adams, 1996; Robinson, 2008) and had a leading role in Museum of Modern Art (MoMa) exhibitions such as Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, from December 1936 to January 1937, curated by Alfred H Barr Jr (Barr, 1936).
Karshan's choice was brave because it dispels a false (and now widely overcome) prejudice that arose from André Breton's partial, and by no means disinterested, view of de Chirico, who was then regarded as one of the greatest and most influential artists of the new art of the 20th century, though only until 1917–1918 (Baldacci, 1994; Benzi, 2019, 2023; Calvesi, 2006).
After that date, the painter's work carried out for more than 50 years was given the generic definition of late de Chirico, which had succeeded as a kind of undead to the genius of the young and ingenious early de Chirico. Today this notion has been totally overcome thanks to the more advanced studies on the artist, which have interpreted his work from the perspective of what Maurizio Calvesi has happily called his ‘continuous metaphysics’. In fact, Calvesi, one of the leading scholars of de Chirico's work, and the group of scholars who collaborate with the Giorgio and Isa de Chirico Foundation have been claiming this for years. What brought about the substantial change which arose in de Chirico's art in the 1920s and the following decades, a change open to various expressive possibilities, different directions of research and unexpected turns of events? I believe that with the identification of the subject or of reality, along with the enigma, de Chirico then replaced the identification of reality – and therefore the subject – with poetry, art itself, myth, fairy tale, history and the significance of the past. The void of Metaphysics is filled with fantasies, apparitions, figures and evocations from the past such as the gladiators. But, at times, painting becomes an evocation of its very self, or rather, of the ‘Museum’ as it relives the fairy tale of the Renaissance and the Baroque. The nihilistic de Chirico matures a positive faith which is the same as that found in art and poetry but, with spirits, it also draws close to a form of confidence in religious feeling. The painter's spirit, free of youthful anguish, opens itself up to a pyrotechnic vision, animated by the spirit of poetry but also by serenity and good humour, as seen in his ‘New Metaphysical art’ of the 1960–1970s. This very interesting period is at times a revisitation. More often than not, it is a fantastic variation on original themes which can now take on the colourations of a witty irony as well. It has often been the mistake of critics, from Breton to the fools who parroted him, to judge the profound change in the artist's relationship with myth and fairy tale as decadence. Indeed, one of the things which I find the most ‘unjustifiable’ in much of the historiography surrounding de Chirico is the continuous containing and keeping of de Chirico firmly stuck at 1919 in homage to the opinion of André Breton (who was, in reality, humanly questionable and domineering). It was he who said and wrote that de Chirico ‘had died’ in 1919 when he had, according to him, returned to ‘classicism’ and had therefore backtracked and abandoned Metaphysical art. The on-going common ground broadcast by the Surrealists’ leader continues to find reception in some areas of critique, even if practically no-one considers it possible to circumscribe de Chirico's creative activity to 1919 anymore. Undoubtedly, this is a thing which needs to be obstinately disputed, something that the Giorgio and Isa de Chirico Foundation has done for years, pursuing a totally straightforward truth: de Chirico's Metaphysical Art is one period only, from 1910 to 1978, the year of his death, whilst the keys to its interpretation are instead numerous with regard to the artist's freedom and the scholar's liberty.
1
(Calvesi, 2006: 29–32)
De Chirico's work can be divided into many periods, but it can only be understood by evaluating the completeness of its developments, now free of all those stereotypes that have for so long distorted the value of his unbroken grandeur.
In the USA, for example, since the 1940s, as will be seen, Breton's ‘totalitarian’ and sharp judgement has had a profound influence on the opinion of a critic like James Thrall Soby by consolidating the positions of a certain modernism that did not allow for exceptions to the intransigence of its ideology (see also Greenberg, 1947).
Thankfully, this stereotype, which was widespread internationally and influenced the reading of the artist's work for years, is now (almost) completely overcome as a result of the rigorous historical critical work that has carefully revaluated the painter's artwork in its entirety, by leading scholars such as Calvesi, Wieland Schmied, Jean Clair, Renato Barilli, Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco, Jole de Sanna, Emily Braun and many others.
It should be noted that, initially, in the USA de Chirico was also valued for his post-1917–1918 works (those that in the USA are referred to as late de Chirico) by prominent collectors such as Katherine S Dreier, Louise and Walter C Arensberg and Albert C Barnes, surely the largest collector of de Chirico in the USA (Boddewin, 1996; Chierici, 2020; Fagiolo dell’Arco, 1995: 247–277; Klich, 1996; Robinson, 2008).
After this initial successful phase, however, the view that increasingly prevailed in the USA was the falsified one propagated by Breton (1928) who had condemned (for mere commercial interests) de Chirico's work after 1917–1918 (Benzi, 2023: 295–312).
As, in fact, Fabio Benzi writes in his seminal volume on de Chirico published in 2019, and recently translated in the US edition (Benzi, 2023: 309), the influence that Breton had on US intellectuals was enormous, especially during his stay in the USA in the war years, and not only in relation to the painting of his fellow Surrealist emigrants, who laid the foundations of abstract expressionism. Breton had, indeed, a great organizational and intellectual capacity. Soby's book on de Chirico, first published by MoMA in New York in 1941, represents an exceptional example of how this influence manifested itself.
Soby’s (1941) book The Early Chirico was followed by a second, expanded edition in 1955, the latter linked to the artist's great exhibition held at MoMA and curated by Soby between September and October 1955 (Soby, 1955). The exhibition, as stated in the press release, intended to cover de Chirico's career from its brilliant start before the First World War to its decline in the 1920s. 2
As Benzi (2023: 311) has underlined again: by bringing to light fundamental material composed of de Chirico's manuscripts dating from his first Parisian period (owned in part by Paulhan and Éluard, who later passed his to Picasso), the 1955 edition of Soby's book provided a solid overview. The published material contained a significant amount of information, albeit somewhat disorganized, and a thorough investigation into the origins of de Chirico's iconography that presented a careful periodization of the complex development of the artist's metaphysical period. The final chapters concerning de Chirico's postwar evolution are based on Breton's reflections and are full of banalities not only with regard to the European Return to Order (which was at that time undervalued by avant-garde criticism) but above all regarding de Chirico himself, whose return to ‘classical’ painting is attributed predominantly to his relationship with an obscure art conservator named Lochoff, thereby reducing the artist's deep meditations in favor of contingent factors and acquaintances of minor significance, as if these were not the fruit, as they were for Picasso and half of Europe, of a profound avant-garde reflection. The influence exerted by a detailed and thorough English-language publication, endowed with that aura of prestige afforded by New York's MoMA (Soby became director of its Department of Painting and Sculpture in 1943), meant that post-war analyses of de Chirico's work were led down a biased and paradoxical path – certainly in terms of international scholarship and partially also of Italian art history.
Moreover, the groundwork for this interpretation had been prepared by two exhibitions in Pierre Matisse's gallery in 1935 and especially in 1940; after 1940, as Jennifer Landes (1996: 33–34) remarks, ‘de Chirico's critical fortunes changed dramatically and irrevocably: surrealism had triumphed in the USA, de Chirico's “early vision” was hailed as the inspiration for the movement, and his later development was consequently seen as repetitive, even worse, a “masquerade”’. Hence, with the advent of modernism in the USA, for years the painting of the so-called ‘late’ de Chirico was condemned for its connection to classicism, even and unjustly confused with fascism to which it was instead antithetical because of its lack of celebratory rhetoric (Cristallini, 2021: 178; Landes, 1996: 41).
The 1972 exhibition
It is in this context that, 16 years after the great exhibition at MoMA, Karshan makes an important and unconventional choice when deciding to set up the new exhibition De Chirico by de Chirico in the period from January to April 1972. 3
The exhibition catalogue mentions the contribution of Claudio Bruni, the curator of the general catalogue of de Chirico's work, and Alexander Iolas, the legendary Greek-born gallery owner who presented works from de Chirico's new neo-metaphysical period in his gallery in Milan in 1968.
Karshan's (1972: 5) own introduction in the exhibition catalogue is a very early sign of a reinterpretation of de Chirico by US critics and others, which would develop more effectively in the following decade. In his paper, he takes action from 1919, the year in which, according to Soby, de Chirico ceased to be innovative: ‘during these 52 years, de Chirico has not only been continually productive but has changed his style and content to the extent that this prolific body of work can be comprehended in distinct periods’. The words that follow seem genuinely innovative and against all those clichés that had burdened the critical reading of the ‘late’ de Chirico: When this writer visited de Chirico in Rome last year, he met a surprisingly vital and productive man, despite his 82 years. More important, he was afforded the opportunity of viewing de Chirico's personal collection of his own work which spans not only that half century of painting, sculpture and graphic art that has not been viewed here, but also several works from the very early period of the artist's development. I was determined that the entire career of this artist should be represented in a retrospective in this country and promptly proposed such an endeavor to the Trustees of The New York Cultural Center. The present exhibition, which this publication accompanies and documents, is the result of this proposal. At long last, de Chirico's work of a lifetime can be directly viewed in New York—not from reproductions or judged in absentia by interpretations and opinions of museum professionals. Rather, this significant corpus of work can be studied and evaluated in the presence of the actual art and in sufficient number to trace unities and metamorphoses. (Karshan, 1972: 5)
Particularly interesting is Karshan's decision to ask the artist to accompany the published works, which cover all his periods and major themes, with autographed annotations in French and to choose one of his writings to introduce the exhibition: I asked the artist to write on each page that contained a reproduction of his work, his personal comments in his own hand in whichever language he preferred for the moment. This he has done. The English translations are typeset at the bottom of each page. De Chirico was also asked to select from his past writings one or more that he wished to have published in the catalogue. He chose his memoirs, a substantial writing and one of his most revealing. The English translation appears, then, as the main text of this publication, one which we believe is truly a unique personal document, as a result of de Chirico's contributions to it. (Karshan, 1972: 5)
Moreover, the artist's autographed annotations in French that accompany the exhibition catalogue are of great importance, as they represent a very important reference to the link between his artworks and the long history of his writings, which he draws upon, and which creates new connections and suggestions of great relevance to the study of de Chirico's entire oeuvre.
It includes paintings, drawings and sculptures ranging from Portrait of the Artist's Mother of 1911 to the very recent works from the neo-metaphysical period of the late 1960s and the very early 1970s, which are now finally enjoying new critical appraisal and international acclaim (Canova, 2021; Canova and Passoni, 2019; Pontiggia, 2022). However, as Michael Taylor has noted, ‘It was too soon, the critics weren’t ready for his late work’, as they were still bound to the modernist model and especially to the canons imposed by Breton, particularly through Soby's writings (Taylor, 2002a: 185).
Reviews of the exhibition were extremely negative (Pontiggia, 2022: 72, 91) and can be summed up in John Canaday's (1972) words featured in the New Times: That de Chirico on the contrary should look more and more like an amateur—like a Sunday painter who admires the great de Chirico but knows his work only from postcards—gives him at least a unique character in his several decades of decline.
The connection between Warhol and de Chirico is just one of the many instances of what has often happened in art history: artists appreciate the work of other artists through intuitive judgement as they have a powerful capacity to understand and evaluate, beyond stereotypes and misreadings, with a vision that manages to penetrate and opens towards the future by achieving results that critics and historiography can reach only long afterwards.
Not surprisingly, in a letter dated 27 April 1950 to Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, Soby himself (Soby, 1950, cited in Robinson, 2008: 354) noted amazedly how de Chirico was admired by US artists of the younger generation: What interests me very much is that de Chirico's reputation, here and in France, has survived the decline of interest in Surrealism. Oddly enough he is greatly admired by the more advanced younger American painters, though a principal premise of these painters – many of them abstract in the ‘spontaneous’ manner of the early Kandinsky – is that they insist on the two-dimensional limitations of the canvas and are opposed to illusionistic perspective, particularly when linear, as with the early de Chirico. They are especially contemptuous of the use of far perspective for emotional or poetic effect. And yet they seem to admire de Chirico! At least some of them do.
The importance of the 1972 de Chirico exhibition in New York, which David McKee, the Guston dealer, remembers visiting many times with Guston, is once again highlighted in this regard. McKee reports that on one of their visits to the exhibition, Guston had noticed that de Chirico's more recent works reaffirmed his right to do whatever he desired in spite of critics, and that his paintings between the 1960s and 1970s reveal an unprecedented freedom, courage and audacity in the history of modern painting (Taylor, 2009: 257).
Not surprisingly, the conversation between de Chirico and Guston was the focus of the 2006 exhibition (Taylor and Melandri, 2006) Enigma Variations: Philip Guston and Giorgio de Chirico at the Santa Monica Museum of Art.
Moreover, it should not be forgotten that one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, Marcel Duchamp (1975: 147), had already expressed a favourable opinion of de Chirico's post-1918 work on several occasions, with his ‘prophetic’ vision of posterity: About 1926 de Chirico abandoned his ‘metaphysical’ conception and turned to a less disciplined brush-stroke. His admirers could not follow him and decided that de Chirico of the second manner had lost the flame of the first. But posterity may have a word to say.
Duchamp did not participate in the Surrealists’ spectacular shunning of the painter. French journalist Pierre Cabanne commented to Duchamp: ‘You defended de Chirico against the anathema of Breton and his friends, maintaining that, in the end, it is posterity who will decide’. To this Duchamp responded, ‘To get back to Breton, the way they condemned de Chirico … was so artificial that it rubbed me the wrong way. There had been other rehabilitations and I felt, ‘Wait for posterity.’ (Cabanne, 1979: 76).
Yet the 1972 exhibition was also the occasion for the origin of a famous photograph that seems to have permanently fixed a mysterious bond between Giorgio de Chirico and Andy Warhol destined to yield successful results 10 years later. It is the famous shot in which Gianfranco Gorgoni portrayed de Chirico and Warhol at a reception in honour of de Chirico at the Italian consul's residence in New York for the 1972 exhibition.
Warhol attended the opening and reception during which Gorgoni recalled throwing, with a sudden gesture, a lamp on the floor which illuminated the two artists from the bottom up: de Chirico was looking towards the photographer, while Warhol turned around dazzled; the Italian painter smiled impassively while the American was surprised, the shadows, fatally, enveloping the two faces made ghostly by the light that flooded them like a flash. This shot, wrote Victor Stoichita (1997: 206), is certainly a snapshot, but 'it has the force of an oracle' that would take shape 10 years later.
Rediscovering the ‘late’ de Chirico: From 1972 to the present
Gorgoni's ‘oracular’ photograph thus represented a kind of prelude to the cycle of works, After de Chirico, created by Andy Warhol in 1982 and first displayed in an exhibition at the Campidoglio in Rome (Bonito Oliva, 1982). 4 It is interesting that one of the last attempts to delegitimize the works of the ‘late’ de Chirico became instead one of the most important moments in the reappraisal of his entire oeuvre.
In the catalogue of the great exhibition devoted to de Chirico at the MoMa in New York in 1982, the curator William Rubin, who was very critical of de Chirico's painting after 1918 (following Soby's ‘Bretonian’ tradition), published a double photo, taken from an article in Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti's Critica d’Arte of 1979, reproducing 18 versions of The Disquieting Muses painted from 1945 to 1962, to negatively highlight de Chirico's habit of replicating some of his more famous works (Ragghianti, 1979; Rubin 1982: 74–75).
These images from the catalogue (which were almost Warhol's work ante litteram) struck the US artist very favourably as he composed his works, in which he reproduces The Disquieting Muses and other paintings by de Chirico, just as mosaics of four repeated serial images with the variation of overlapping acid colours, typical of his Pop production.
Interestingly, Warhol's works, commissioned by collector Carlo Bilotti, reproduced works by the ‘late’ de Chirico, replicas of his works from the 1910s and 1920s.
As Michael Taylor (2002b: 164, 166) wrote, in his interview with curator Achille Bonito Oliva (Warhol, 1982): Andy Warhol remarked in his dead-pan way on the serial nature of de Chirico's work, which he greatly admired, noting the similarities in their working methods: ‘De Chirico repeated the same images through-out his life. I believed he did it not only because people and dealers asked him to do it, but because he liked it and viewed repetition as a way of expressing himself. This is probably what we have in common … The difference? What he repeated regularly, year after year, I repeat the same day in the same painting’. Earlier that year, Warhol had seen and enjoyed the de Chirico retrospective at MoMA, organized by William Rubin. Indeed, it was Rubin's reproduction in the exhibition catalogue of Carlo Ragghianti's image from Critica d'Arte - eighteen nearly identical versions of de Chirico's The Disquieting Muses arranged in three neat rows spread over two pages – that made the deepest impression on the younger artist. This grid-like organization recalls the modular format of Warhol's Pop paintings of soup cans, such as One Hundred Cans, 1962, which present images of consumer goods arranged in stacked and ordered rows that mimic the repetitive displays on supermarket shelves. Warhol recognized in de Chirico a kindred spirit, a role model who shared his interest in a serial approach to making art, as well as his knack for self-promotion and self-mythologizing. No doubt attracted to de Chirico's glamorous position as one of the last survivors of the pre-First World War international avant-garde, Warhol frequently visited him during the 1970s: ‘Every time I saw de Chirico's paintings, I felt close to him’, he explained to Bonito Oliva in their interview. ‘Every time I saw him I felt I had known him forever. I think he felt the same way … Once he made the remark that we both had white hair!’. Warhol's paintings after de Chirico can be viewed as an extension of the Italian artist's multivalent legacy, in that they succinctly highlight the complex ideas behind de Chirico's decision to repeat certain of his earlier works over and over again.
A newly created atmosphere of a return to painting arrived in the 1980s, and in that context of post-modernism it favoured, at last, a reappraisal of de Chirico's entire oeuvre, overcoming the outdated cliché of 1917 which instead considered de Chirico dead as an artist.
Robert Rosenblum (2003) in his article in Artforum testified how at that time the reading of de Chirico's work had completely changed: When I think about the aesthetic sea change of the early ‘80 s, I keep coming back to MoMA's 1982 de Chirico retrospective, which, in fact, was not a retrospective at all. Coming to a halt in the 1930s, it censored more than half his career. (He died in 1978.) The show confirmed the received wisdom that, after his youthful glory days, de Chirico became a traitor to the modernist cause. But William Rubin's essay in the catalog also contained an unexpectedly subversive illustration, a double-page spread of eighteen (yes, eighteen!) near identical versions of The Disquieting Muses, 1917, all painted between 1945 to 1962. The old-fashioned point was to demonstrate again the bankruptcy of the later de Chirico, who would often stoop to making replicas and variations of his signature masterpieces. But times had changed. The grid-style layout of these eighteen 18 suddenly felt at home in the world of Warhol, who, only months later, would offer his own mass-produced de Chirico show in Rome with assembly-line riffs on the canonic masterpieces. By the decade's end, Mike Bidlo had upped the ante with his facsimile de Chirico retrospective in Paris, which, unlike MoMA's, covered the artist's entire controversial career. What could be more shocking than a return to realism, whether populist or museum-worthy? For this, again late de Chirico provided fuel, especially with his robust revivals of the Old Masters, quoting the styles of Titian and Rubens, Canaletto and Courbet. It was a neorealist milieu that would nurture the development of many artists of younger generations, from Eric Fischl to John Currin. Who could ever have expected that all this scorned and buried 20th-century art could ignite fresh imaginations? In the early 1980s, walls were crashing, vistas were opening and sinner artists like de Chirico were not only absolved but embraced. A different past and a different future would be possible. What a liberation it was to have the old catechism turn into history.
In this context, a 1984 de Chirico exhibition at the Robert Miller Gallery in New York was also an important occasion which brought a reconsideration of the artist. The exhibition featured post-metaphysical and baroque paintings and was organized again in collaboration with Claudio Bruni. In his catalogue essay, Robert Pincus-Witten (1984, n.p.) clearly testified to a new appreciation of the master's entire oeuvre: The present overview of late painting, the first large viewing of these works since a survey at the now defunct New York Cultural Center in 1972, will go far to put to rest the canard of de Chirico's later deficiencies once and for all, and reveal them to be what they are paintings of great presence and individuality, work that engages—as does all modernist work—in dialectical discourse, not only with de Chirico's personal, independent and intransigent history but also with an un-questioned modernist reductivist abstraction. No longer hobbled by reductivist pieties, our sense of modernism has been tremendously enriched by a refreshed appetite for allegory and myth. In this respect contemporary painting has discovered—actually rediscovered—a new paradigm. In that signal place of honor de Chirico casts the longest shadow. Yet many artists have been influenced by this so-called late work, among them Briton Malcolm Morley, who is having a retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum. Younger artists revere his late work. Among them are Jedd Garet, Julian Schnabel, and particularly de Chirico's Italian progeny, Sandro Chia and Enzo Cucchi.
This, after all, had also been noted by Achille Bonito Oliva (1982: 9) in his introductory essay of the exhibition in Rome Warhol Verso de Chirico, in which the Italian painter was seen as a model for the artists of the Transavantgarde (such as Cucchi and Chia), who were very successful in the USA in the 1980s, and ‘who learned from him the eclectic use of citation, of the stylistic revival of linguistic models belonging to the history of art’.
However, the importance of the last part of de Chirico's oeuvre, his neo-metaphysical period, was highlighted by Calvesi (1982: 11) in his seminal book La metafisica schiarita, in which he ideally turned to de Chirico and recalled his influence that was already recognized by artists of the generations that came to the limelight in the 1960s: we loved you, at the turning point of the sixties because you resumed the dialogue with the somewhat flattened silhouettes of your old heroes and with the black fuses of those childish and strong yellow suns (…) because we recognized, without contrast with the limpid voices of Balla and Boccioni, your colorful chiaroscuros, your spheres, your signs and arrows, your seatbacks and chimneys, your lacquered objects and now as if detached from the paintings, something of your lightenings and suspensions, in the new moment of an art that disseminated itself among the progress of the expanding world like a concert, or a refreshing rain: from Colla or Melotti to Jasper Johns, from New Dada and Pop Art to the third roman school, from New York to us. Thus, you blessed a season in which we were happy.
The new interest in the so-called late de Chirico had also taken shape in the article on de Chirico's American period in the 1930s published in Artforum by Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco (1984: 78–83).
Moreover, Fagiolo, an important scholar of de Chirico's work even for the 1920s–1930s period, had also published an essay in the 1982 MoMA exhibition on de Chirico in Paris between 1911 and 1915 (Fagiolo dell’Arco, 1982: 11–34).
Thus, this new international context gave Emily Braun (1996: 15) an opportunity to write about, in her introductory essay of the 1996 New York exhibition, Giorgio de Chirico and America: What the modernist decries as cynicism, however, the post-modernist accepts with delight. The negation of originality and uniqueness, the pursuit of appropriation and repetition represented by late de Chirico were suddenly pertinent to the strategies of younger artists in the 1980s. In America, the reevaluation of de Chirico's later work was initiated by commercial galleries, beginning in 1984 with an exhibition of the artist's ‘post-metaphysical and baroque’ paintings at the Robert Miller Gallery in New York. In his essay for the catalogue, Robert Pincus-Witten set de Chirico's ‘personal, independent, and intransigent history’ against the ‘unquestioned modernist reductivist abstraction'.
Perhaps it is no coincidence that even Jeff Koons (2013), an artist who exploded in the 1980s and has more recently dialogued with the great masters of art history in the Gazing Balls series, speaking of his relationship with Andy Warhol cited the influence of de Chirico: We have worked on the idea that everything is beautiful for what it is. And on removing prejudices: this is perhaps our real common trait. Then, we are also both children and grandchildren of Duchamp and Picasso and of all the others who came before us: Manet and de Chirico […]. I believe there is a thin thread running through the history of art that holds the different eras together. Each artist takes a little piece of what those before him have done and proceeds.
The vision of progress imposed by modernism now appears to be outdated, and de Chirico can also be considered a model for his interest in the great painting of past centuries, anticipating artists such as Warhol, Koons, Giulio Paolini, Francesco Vezzoli, Damien Hirst and many, many others.
Thus, despite some negative positions related to old stereotypes about the ‘late’ de Chirico such as the heavily sarcastic one by Robert C Morgan (2004) or that of Barry Schwabsky (2018), in recent years de Chirico's painting from the 1920s to his death has been the subject of a broad reappraisal even by artists and critics in the USA.
This has, moreover, followed the great research and dissemination work of the Giorgio and Isa de Chirico Foundation through its journal Metaphysical Art, but also through studies, international exhibitions and the publication of works added to the general catalogue of the artist edited by Bruni, which has now reached its fifth volume, and monographs such as the one mentioned above by Benzi (2023), by Pontiggia (2021) on the works of the 1940s and by those who write on the neo-metaphysical period (Canova, 2021). 6 Particular mention should also be made of the great exhibition Giorgio de Chirico, The fabrique des rêves at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 2009.
Important essays on de Chirico's neo-metaphysical period (Wetterwald, 2009) and on the interest of artists such as Philip Guston and Larry Rivers in his late works (Taylor, 2009) have also been published in the catalogue of this exhibition. Another important occasion was the Giorgio de Chirico – Giulio Paolini exhibition held at the Center for Italian Modern Art (CIMA) in New York in 2016–2017. 7
As, more recently, Heather Ewing (2017) noted: And yet for many artists, such as Guston or Warhol or Paolini, de Chirico's later work has been a vital source. His practice of self-citation, copying, and appropriation or pastiche, his flamboyant self-portraits in Baroque costume, appeal to our postmodern sensibilities, our fascination with camp and the ‘bad painting’ that emerged in the 1980s.
In the article ‘On Warhol's “After de Chirico”’, Neil Printz (2017), editor of the Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné, announced the themes of his lecture given at CIMA on 21 June 2017, in which he highlighted ‘Warhol's intense identification with the theatricality of de Chirico's persona and subversive status within the avant-garde; it studied the impact of de Chirico's late work upon Warhol's own late painting'.
The same Brooklyn Rail issue also contains the article ‘“Homeric dawns”: Giorgio de Chirico's Metaphysical Interior (with Small Factory)’ by Ara H Merjian (2023), a leading scholar of de Chirico's 1910s work (Merjian, 2014).
We then find the interesting resume of the conversation, moderated by Giovanni Casini, ‘Looking at late de Chirico: Matvey Levenstein, Stephen Ellis, and Lisa Yuskavage’ held at CIMA on 21 March 2017 (Levenstein et al., 2017), where three contemporary artists give their positive views on ‘late’ de Chirico.
Matvey Levenstein makes an interesting consideration that fits well with de Chirico's thought, which is absolutely distant from the ideology of progress and linked instead to Nietzsche's concept of eternal return: The past is not a problem, academicism is: all these ‘dos and don’ts’, rules and regulations. You know an academic moment has arrived when the contrarian spirit had been snuffed out. The creation of a dogmatic, linear, progressivist art history becomes a form of oppression for them. The whole point of overthrowing the ancient régime was to be free—what is the point of becoming a foot soldier in the march of Hegelian art history? You can also see it as a kind of anti-Futurist impulse. Futurists saw the past as something to be killed, the future as a glorious thing […]. The point is to create a crack in the wall. Whether it comes from the avant-garde or from a rear guard really does not matter. There are people who like to build the walls, and people who like to crack them. You can see [André] Breton [the founder of Surrealism] as a kind of Donald Trump of modernism, and de Chirico as someone who chafes under those expectations. (Levenstein et al., 2017)
Lisa Yuskavage, a passionate devotee of de Chirico's Gladiators, pointed out how de Chirico's works after 1918 were subject to censorship in US museums: It began to really irritate me that American museums have so decided that these works do not exist. It's like cutting your gay cousin out of the family photo album because he doesn’t fit your ideal family story. We know that's not right. So, are we, the viewers, that stupid that we can’t make our own decisions about an entire body of work? (Levenstein et al., 2017) They didn’t understand where he was coming from, nor care to understand, and therefore they couldn’t imagine his trajectory. His trajectory takes him to this idea of ‘bad painting,’ and I think it led to a lot of great painters, like late Guston. Also, his use of repetition of images very much influenced Warhol. Young painters should be looking at these really nutty late de Chiricos and figuring out how to rip this off. (Levenstein et al., 2017)
At the end of this excursus, a mention of the very recent exhibition Giorgio de Chirico, Horses: The Death of a Rider held at the Vito Schnabel Gallery (March–July 2023) is deemed essential.
Gallerist Vito Schnabel, son of the aforementioned painter Julian Schnabel, recalls being introduced to de Chirico's art as a child by his godfather, the international gallerist Bruno Bischofberger, from whom he has drawn inspiration ever since: Giorgio de Chirico was one of the first painters whose work transported me into another world. I first saw his paintings as a child, and the encounter had an everlasting effect on the way I look at art to this day. It introduced me to that rare sensation– that indescribable feeling that, for me, comes from the combination of mystery, pathos and sheer visual beauty– that I am always searching for in art. It's an honor to be able to present this group of works by one of the great painters of the twentieth century. (Vito Schnabel Gallery, 2023a)
Jennifer Krasinski (2023) in the New Yorker writes that the exhibition ‘is a jewel of a show, featuring sixteen paintings, made across five decades, by Giorgio de Chirico—meditations not on horses, per se, but on their symbolic heft’. Will Heinrich (2023) in the New York Times also has laudatory words for the works on display: ‘the lush, peculiar and consistently delightful paintings show the Greek-born Italian painter at the top of his game for the better part of five decades’.
James Panero (2023) on the New Criterion writes: With work here from the 1920s through the 1970s, the assembly shows an artist increasingly interested in the symbolism of mythology and antiquity. Like other moderns who took a classical turn after World War I, de Chirico focused on war horses and their riders in dreamlike imagery that appear out of time and place. For de Chirico, the way forward was a return path through art history. Eventually de Chirico would grow so tired of the distinctions made between his early and later work that he claimed all of his paintings were metaphysical, thereby both acknowledging the ongoing sporadic creation of paintings in his first mature style and refusing to distinguish between those paintings and the other paintings that came afterward for almost sixty years […]. De Chirico may have felt he had more than a little in common with the hunted animals and embattled men in these paintings dated from 1926 to 1970 […]. De Chirico may have left his past behind, but he's brought it forward too, which is one reason the translation of Uomo ferito che cade da cavallo (1937–38), another war painting, as ‘Death of a Rider’ is unfortunate, as it forgoes a more direct translation: ‘wounded man falling from horse’. The title's key Italian word is ferito (wounded), and the wounded man is caught in midair, feet up as he falls on the other side of his horse, while in the boat the archer, his bow still vibrating, and the boat's poler watch and wait. You can die from your wounds or survive them, and de Chirico refuses to choose either eventuality. The painting's neither pep talk nor autopsy. The gallery could have gone along with the artist, but a single misstep shouldn’t keep anyone away from this marvelous and action packed exhibit.
In occasion of the exhibition Giorgio de Chirico, Horses: The Death of a Rider, on 28 June 2023, a panel (Vito Schnabel Gallery, 2023b) was also organized in the gallery, again in collaboration with the Brooklyn Rail, moderated by Phong H Bui (co-Founder and Artistic Director of the journal) with Mary Ann Caws, a prominent art historian and literary critic, and Robert Storr, the first American Director of Visual Arts of the Venice Biennale in 2007.
The panel was very interesting because of the freedom with which the three panellists approached de Chirico's works, overcoming old stereotypes and appreciating the freedom, often playful, of an artist who always played the great game of art by dialoguing with the past to construct something that speaks powerfully to our present.
Times have finally changed and de Chirico can be appreciated in all the quality of his long and unbroken ‘continuous metaphysics’.
