Looking Backward

By ROBERT HUGHES

No living artist enjoys a more bizarre reputation than the Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico. Up to 1918, he turned out a body of work that set him firmly among the masters of European modernism. His "mysterious objects," moonstruck piazzas and tilting, empty colonnades fascinated the Surrealists and became one of the inspirations of their movement. Rene Magritte and Salvador Dali were both De Chirico's debtors; Yves Tanguy resolved to be a painter only after seeing an early De Chirico in a dealer's window in 1923. Andre Breton, the pope of Surrealism, hailed him as one of the "fixed points" of the new sensibility. But then De Chirico's own aims switched, and the admiration was reversed. Hardly anyone in 50 years has had a kind word for De Chirico's later output. It is generally written off as the work of a self-plagiarizing bore.

On the other hand, very little of it has been shown outside Italy. So the chance existed that a gross injustice had been done to the mature work of a gifted painter; in 1918, after all, De Chirico was only 30, and he has kept working ever since, denying that he ever was a modern artist and grumpily insisting that the Surrealists totally misunderstood him and his work. To present the evidence, the New York Cultural Center has assembled a retrospective of some 180 paintings, drawings, lithographs and bronzes, nearly all from De Chirico's own collection, spanning six decades from 1911 to 1971.

It would be pleasant to report that all rumors of the maestro's decline are greatly exaggerated. But they are not. No 20th century artist -- not even Dali -- went down so fast. The homage at the Cultural Center is a lugubrious affair, but an interesting one nevertheless; for it records in great detail how one gifted painter went backward under pressure, like an irritated crab, into a historical impasse -- and has stuck there ever since, snapping his crusty pincers at every stir in the water.

The obsessions of child hood memory permeated De Chirico's work, and his childhood with its Levantine eccentricities might have come from Durrell's Alexandria Quartet. The son of a peripatetic Sicilian engineer, a man of fiery temperament much given to dueling, De Chirico was born in Greece and constantly moved house. "In my life," he observed in a memoir, "there is some thing fatal which makes me change addresses." The character of these years -- a melancholic idyll of transience, conducted in a series of sirocco-damp villas across a classical landscape -- is built into his early paintings. It was reinforced when, as an art student in Munich, he encountered the dreamlike, proto-surrealist canvases of the 19th century Swiss romantic Arnold Boecklin. By the time he settled in Turin in 1911, the meditative cast of his mind was set.

What De Chirico's work from 1911 to 1918 brilliantly performs is an archaeology of the self. Images rise from childhood memory with a peculiar, disconnected intensity; they are fragments of a lost life, like sculpture found in the rubble of an ancient city. "If a work of art is to be truly immortal," he proclaimed, "it must pass quite beyond the limits of the human world, without any sign of common sense or logic. In this way the work will draw nearer to dream and to the mind of a child."

Unchanged Light. De Chirico's empty squares and silent towers seem at first to be conceived as a partial homage to the Italian Renaissance. It is a windless, ideal space where the light never changes and shadows do not move. Human figures are either distant specks or huge, sculptural presences--bronze father figures on plinths, reclining "classical" marbles or faceless wooden dummies. But this world has none of the solidity of Renaissance townscape. Instead, it is enigmatic and spectral; the perspectives tilt irrationally and contradict one another, the fac,ades are cardboard, the inhabitants ghosts. "These characters in costume who gesticulate under a 'real' sky, in the middle of 'real' nature, have always given me the impression of something as stupid as it is fake," De Chirico wrote later. He was speaking of theater, but the preference is equally true of his early painting. De Chirico had intelligently brought some of the flattening devices of Cubism to bear on a wholly anecdotal art. The fragments of memory found their distorted space; the means fit the end.

Sheer Will. Ironically, the decline set in when De Chirico resolved to be a Great Artist in the traditional, Italian sense of the word. "I have been tormented by one problem for almost three years now--the problem of craftsmanship," he wrote to Breton in 1922. The gulf between the early work and De Chirico's St. George Killing the Dragon, 1940, can only be explained in terms of this problem. St. George, with its glutinous, worried paint, its muddily incoherent color and its torpid drawing, would hardly pass as a student academy piece; it is recognizable, though only just, as a mock Titian. But behind it one can sense manic obstinacy, as though De Chirico were trying to root himself in the past and abolish the present. Significantly, it bears a Latin inscription: "De Chirico, the best painter, painted this."

The dream of antiquity becomes concrete in De Chirico's later work, and all his efforts are posited on the belief that somehow it can be given life --if not by talent, then by sheer will. De Chirico's self-magniloquent portraits in armor and 17th century lace are not simply costume pieces, but efforts to inhabit the dream and be a one-man Renaissance. His interminable pairs of Bambi-eyed horses prancing on a marble-littered beach have the same intention. The sum effect is, inevitably, absurd: for De Chirico has no more talent for illusionism than the average calendar artist. It becomes parody--and when De Chirico is not parodying Rubens, Tintoretto or Rembrandt, he parodies himself, as in The Sadness of Springtime, 1970, producing stiff, cluttered repaints of his "metaphysical" period. But the tension has gone. One has seen the originals--except when the "originals" are recent products, for it is an open secret in the Italian art world that De Chirico has painted numerous works supposedly from 1916-17 over the past few decades. Perhaps the most vivid lesson to be drawn from the Cultural Center's retrospective is that in art, obsessiveness does not win back what defensiveness loses.

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