Giorgio de Chirico at the MoMA

Et quid amabo nisi quod aenigma est?
(What shall I love if not the enigma?)
–Self-portrait, 1911

For the past seventy 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. (Robert Hughes, Nothing If Not Critical: Selected Essays on Art and Artists)

When I visit art museums, I usually like to take my time. I would focus on one or two sections, rather than visually ransack the whole panoply on display. I would like my visit to be memorable by taking time to mind the details, up close as well as from a distance, letting the physical presence of the work sink in, including the texture of the brush strokes, and if possible, the smell of the paint (without tripping the alarms!). Thus, with a limited time in Madrid, I had skipped the Prado entirely, and visited the smaller Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía to spend a whole afternoon with Picasso’s Guernica. I did the same thing with The Arnolfini Wedding at the London National Gallery, The Birth of Venus at the Uffizi, and The Raft of the Medusa at the Louvre.

It actually takes more effort to establish an emotional connection with a very iconic work of art–something that one has seen countless times in postcards and picture books. The anticipation and expectations cloud, even spoil, the immediacy of being right in front of it. It is difficult to disentangle my previous experience with its innumerable reproductions and confront it directly for the first time. That is why I delight in discovering new works (at least to me) thrown in with the celebrated ones, because I can engage them with a fresh eye, without the burden of memories. Imagine therefore my astonishment stumbling into the Lenbachhaus in Munich and finding a horde of Kandinsky, Marc, and Macke; or turning a corner at the modern Pinakothek and be confronted by Max Beckmann’s tryptych The Temptation of St. Anthony; or coming across the hopeful murals of Hans Erni–Swiss constructivist painter, if ever there was one–while on “official tour” of yarn salesmen at, of all places, the Transportation Museum in Zürich.

Such was my surprise in discovering the early work of Giorgio de Chirico whilst perusing the Impressionists at the MoMA in New York. What caught my attention, in particular, were the clever titles he assigned his work: both poetic and occult, they evoke rather than signify what is depicted on the canvas. They could be titles of metaphysical sonnets (The Nostalgia of the Infinite, The Enigma of a Day), the metaphors of psychoanalysts (The Anxious Journey, The Melancholy of Departure), or captions on the trumps of modernist Tarot cards (The Duo, The Seer, The Song of Love, The Serenity of the Scholar). Indeed, for de Chirico, the use of vanishing points is a ruse, and, together with distortion of proportions, actually render the picture flat (Hughes), which, to me, is not unlike the medieval iconography in Tarot cards.

I thought at the time his paintings were a little derivative of Dali’s desolate landscapes littered with disembodied objects, and to some extent Magritte’s painterly palette and style. It turns out that these paintings from his pittura metafisica phase (1911-1917) predates the Surrealist movement of the early 1920′s, and it was Dali and Magritte, the quintessential Surrealist painters, who, in fact, appropriated his gestures. This revelation calls to mind Borges’ little essay (does he write any voluble ones?) Kafka and His Precursors where he observes that “every writer creates his own precursors”.

The poem “Fears and Scruples” by Browning foretells Kafka’s work, but our reading of Kafka perceptibly sharpens and deflects our reading of the poem. Browning did not read it as we do now. In the critic’s vocabulary, the word “precursor” is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotation of polemics or rivalry. The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future (c.f. T. S. Eliot, Points of View, 1941, pp. 25-26).

In the same way, I recognized Dali and Magritte, and the Surrealist imagery, in de Chirico, whose images where nabbed by the visual artists of the movement as the proper “motifs to express their vision of an estranged urban world” (Hughes). The Surrealists created de Chirico as much as he created them, and our reading of his pittura metafisica is from now on “sharpened and deflected” by their parlance.

After the 1920′s de Chirico abandoned the Surrealists and the French avant-garde, and went into a long decline as an “obdurate” classicist chasing after the ideal of Titian. “[He] alone had stepped out into the light of classicism, leaving Picasso and the rest behind in their ‘primitive’ darkness and willful modernist regression” (Hughes). He spectacularly failed, and from 1945-1962 painted backdated forgeries of his own earlier avant-garde work. “[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” (Hughes). Interestingly, Dali, who never abandoned Surrealism, suffered the same extended decline; in contrast to de Chirico who backtracked and luxuriated in bygone styles, Dali stagnated in endless repetitions of Surrealist mannerisms.

For a long time the near universal judgment on Salvador Dali was that he had outlived himself. The Surrealist work he did from 1929 to 1939 was brilliant and durable. After that came decades of repetition and kitsch, the years of his collaborations with Walt Disney– never completed–and his magazine ads for Elsa Schiaparelli lipstick. (Richard Lacayo, Time Magazine, 13 Feb 2005)

One of the kitsch he produced in his old age was a deck of Tarot cards, with each of the 78 cards signed in his typical flourish. On the first numbered card, the self-styled Surrealist poses as The Magician (El Mago), with his impossibly stiff, upwardly curved moustache. In the end, it is hard to decide between the avant-garde artist who aspired to be an academic painter, or the one who was reduced to a parody of himself, who was the sadder Fool.