Provocative touch
Andrew Lambirth
G
iorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) is one of those artists people like to pronounce over. The early work is generally praised, and the later disparaged, but to examine that dialogue in any depth we would need a major retrospective of his art, and this tiny themed exhibition makes no pretence to be that. For a year or two at the beginning of his career, de Chirico adopted the classical subject of the sleeping Ariadne deserted by Theseus (whom she had just helped slay her half-brother the Minotaur), and turned it into a powerful modern image of melancholy and abandonment. De Chirico himself, an Italian born in Greece, had come to Paris in the summer of 1911, fleeing conscription. He was a deserter, and, although he enrolled in the Italian army in 1915, the four years before that were to some extent spent on the run.
How did this affect his art? De Chirico began to paint deserted piazzas, somewhat similar in look to the colonnaded architec
ture of Turin, stained with long shadows and distorted with stagy perspectives. Lonely, threatening places, full of foreboding. In the centre of these compositions generally stood a statue of Ariadne on a plinth. A mysterious figure or two might lurk on the periphery of the square, and in the background would be a beflagged tower or giant kiln, with a sailing ship and steam train perhaps converging beyond. These scenes are gravid with possible meaning. If, for instance, the ship is intended to signify the departure of Theseus, then the train could symbolise the imminent arrival of Bacchus, who will take the abandoned Ariadne to be his wife. But will the statue awake? And who is really coming?
Apollinaire, poet and apostle of Modernism, called de Chirico 'the most astonishing of all the modern painters', though he felt his colours were too gloomy — 'shades of pools covered with dead leaves'. Actually, the painter's typical livery of sage, sand and khaki was regularly enlivened by red towers and blue-shaded arcades, but by and large de Chirico played down his palette as part of his general attitude of cool classical restraint. Here are no rhetorical flourishes nor expressive brushmarks. De Chirico, who encouraged the myth of himself as the great outsider, made his style deliberately impersonal and low-key, which of course only added to its mysteriousness. The work was felt to be sufficiently new and substantial to be admitted to the French avant-garde (about which even then the artist probably had mixed feelings), and it convinced Andre Breton for one that de Chirico was the true pioneer of Surrealism.
The later work is in some ways even odder. By this time, de Chirico had rejected modernism in favour of emulating the Old Masters. He also went in for recycling his own works. The Piazza D'Italia series, a group of which are included in this exhibition, is a case in point. All feature the familar arcaded setting for Ariadne's statue, and most are pretty grim. 'Piazza D'Italia Metafisica' (c.1950) is probably the strongest image here. Why did de Chirico often paint so carelessly? In 'Poetry of Summer', c.1970, the shadows have become very weirdly shaped indeed. The elongated figure standing in the arcade is not well drawn, but is at least better than the reclining Ariadne which seems fashioned out of decomposing cotton wool. And the tower's top has been badly lowered in an obvious pentimento.
There is something very provocative about these jumbled, badly drawn figures set against crisp clear-cut buildings. (The locomotive's smoke is usually better modelled than Ariadne.) The precision of the architecture seems to be deliberately at odds with the amorphous, sloppily painted figures. What could this signify? Is de Chirico trying to make a statement contrasting the ephemeral nature of man with the solid achievement of culture? Apparently, Ariadne and her thread (by which she guided Theseus out of the labyrinth) had now come to signify something quite different to him — the artist's quest for knowledge and perfection in painting. Yet these paintings are hardly good examples of that. The questions for the moment remain unanswered.
Giorgio de Chirico and the Myth of Ariadne is still an interesting idea for an exhibition, though its London manifestation is a sadly cut-down version of a larger show mounted by the Philadelphia Museum of Art. There are only some 18 paintings on view, together with related drawings and sculptures. Although this is a refreshingly concentrated size for an exhibition, too much has been missed out. In Philadelphia there were more than 50 exhibits — still a manageable dimension — and the lavish catalogue (Merrell, £16.95 pbk) constantly reminds the reader of key pictures simply not available in London. Something of a mixed blessing then, but at least it gives us a chance to contemplate anew the strange and disquieting vision of a highly individual and at times original artist.
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