Whatever happened to Giorgio de Chirico? That was the reaction of modernist critics to such late paintings as Knight with Red Cape (c. 1960). LACMA acquired the Knight as a a gift of Elena Siff Erenberg in memory of Philip Francis Siff and has recently put it on view. Given that de Chirico was one of the most important modernists still missing from LACMA’s collection, you might have expected some fanfare. But of course Knight looks nothing like the metaphysical paintings that the artist is known for. It’s an example of the “neo-baroque” style that many contemporaries dismissed as a joke. More recently, however, the late de Chirico’s plundering of art history and faux-thrift store badness has gained a certain following. The Getty touched on this phase of de Chirico’s art in its 2011 “Modern Antiquity” exhibition.
De Chirico was the only canonical modernist who spent most of his life proclaiming that modern art was junk. He called for a return to Old Master values as early as 1919, just as his career was taking off. The whole avant garde retreated after the first World War, but no one more decisively (and permanently) than de Chirico. Meanwhile postwar surrealists sought a way to expand that literary movement into visual art. De Chirico’s enigmatic cityscapes were just the ticket. He became the unintended godfather of surrealism and even of modern cinema. Fellini, Antonioni, and Hitchcock cited his influence and framed shots like de Chirico’s eerie plazas.
By then de Chirico had long disowned his trademark style. He blustered that his neo-baroque gladiators and knights were better than the early works and was pained that few others shared his opinion. The Museum of Modern Art’s posthumous retrospective, in 1982, tactfully minimized the last three-quarters of his career.
One of the few institutions receptive to late de Chirico was the Italian automaker Fiat. In 1957 it commissioned him to design a poster for the new Fiat 1400. The red-caped figure and horse are closely related to those in the LACMA painting. (Fiat must have a soft spot for celebrities’ second acts: Its Abarth 500 commercials featured Charlie Sheen.)
De Chirico took to signing some of his paintings Pictor Optimus (free translation: “Tiger Blood”). He tweaked the art market by denouncing some of his early paintings as forgeries—and forging his own backdated metaphysical paintings, in order to cash in on the demand for his early work. He kept telling dealers he’d “found” some early paintings under his bed. This led to the art-trade joke that the Maestro’s bed must have been six feet off the floor.
De Chirico died in 1978, the same year as Marcia Tucker’s “‘Bad’ Painting” exhibition. Today late works like Divine Horses (right) recall Jim Shaw’s thrift store paintings or the distortions, anatomical and aesthetic, of Yuskavage, Currin, and Condo. That implies irony, but as far as I can tell, de Chirico had the earnestness of the genius (or crank). He insisted he was carrying the torch of Rubens and Velázquez into the twentieth century’s strong headwind.
De Chirico’s late career almost reads like a conceptual prank, a deep-undercover Andy Kaufman put-on in which he never broke character. The artist doesn’t crack a smile in his self-portraits, presenting himself as the very model of a major anti-modernist.
