Art: The Metaphysician's Last Exit

The painter Giorgio de Chirico died of a heart attack in Rome last week. He was 90, and his death removed one of the last connections between our day and the formative years of modern art. Nearly all who created the modernist vocabulary between 1900 and 1930 are dead. Four remain: Marc Chagall, 91; Joan Mird, 85; Sonia Delaunay, 93; and Salvador Dali, 74. None have produced much work of consequence in recent years; posterity will not have time for late Chagall or post-1939 Dali. Nevertheless, De Chirico's career was so uneven as to have been unique. His impact on art would probably have been the same if he had died in 1920 instead of 1978. He was the epitome of the artist as burnt-out case.

Between 1912 and 1920, De Chirico produced a series of images—his pittura metafisica, or metaphysical painting—that altered the history of modernism. His empty colonnades and squares, populated by statues and shadows, exerted a vast influence on the growth of a specifically surrealist art. Max Ernst, René Magritte and Salvador Dali all paid homage to the liberating power of early De Chirico. He seemed to have made the actions of the dreaming mind more accessible, vivid and poignant than any other painter. "If a work of art is to be truly immortal," he explained, "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." The tilted, exaggerated perspectives of De Chirico's pre-1920 paintings, their dry meridional light (he could extract more mystery from the harsh hour of noon than most people could find in midnight) and their sense of theatrical expectation, like the hush that precedes the raising of the curtain, gave his work a superbly irrational quality.

On the stage of De Chirico's early paintings, two cultures met. One was the "classical" Mediterranean culture that dominated his boyhood memories. Born in Greece, the son of a peripatetic Sicilian railroad engineer, De Chirico knew it well: the ocher walls of provincial towns, the neglected public gardens, the statuary and antique rubble. On the other hand, modernity was constantly thrusting its emblems into this dream: trains, clocks, surveyors' instruments, rulers, protractors. From this collision between mythic time and measured time, an extraordinary poignancy arose; and the best of these early De Chiricos have not dated.

Then, around 1922, he made a complete volte-face. He was only 34 then, and the desire to be an old master seized him; the modernist experiment was too uncertain, and history, he thought, would condemn it. "I have seen," he wrote to André Breton in 1922, "yes, I have finally seen, that terrible things are happening today in painting." Amid hoots of derision from his former surrealist admirers, he marched firmly to the rear guard and took up an irritably defensive stance, maintaining it for the next half-century.