Preface

Merjian, Ara H.

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Preface

Ara H. Merjian

Giorgio de Chirico and the Metaphysical City: Nietzsche, Modernism, Paris

With the deadpan of a legal deposition, Giorgio de Chirico declares himself beyond the ins and outs of avant-garde affiliation. He responds here to a casual interview conducted at the height of Mussolini’s twenty-year regime – one that by and large ignored the painter about as much as he, in turn, dodged its ideological pomp. Since abandoning his so-called Metaphysical style in...

Author

Ara H. Merjian

PublisherYale University Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00059.002

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-18582

Preface

L’Ambrosiano: Which factors most compelled you to leave the avant-garde?

Giorgio de Chirico: I never entered nor left the avant-garde.

“Referendum,” ed. Vittorio Barbaroux, L’Ambrosiano, 23 February, 1938

With the deadpan of a legal deposition, Giorgio de Chirico declares himself beyond the ins and outs of avant-garde affiliation. He responds here to a casual interview conducted at the height of Mussolini’s twenty-year regime – one that by and large ignored the painter about as much as he, in turn, dodged its ideological pomp. Since abandoning his so-called Metaphysical style in favor of a more rigid traditionalism, de Chirico had wielded a pedantic brush. Exchanging modernity for the Old Masters in 1919, he declared himself the “Pictor Classicus,” peopling his previously spare scenes with prodigal sons and ashen gladiators, ephebic bathers and cavorting horses. While this notorious “return to the craft” coincided with a broader, reactionary return to order in Italy and abroad, it served the painter’s own aesthetic about-face far more than any nominal politics. De Chirico aimed above all to settle into an Italy which had long eluded him – a Greek-born, German-educated foreigner more familiar with Paris than Rome – as a true homeland. The unsettling anonymity of his Metaphysical cityscapes thus became increasingly, and speciously, grounded in a retroactive romanità. In the annals of art history, de Chirico has faced an ad hoc indictment ever since. It was no Fascist tribunal that put him on trial, but the less forgiving jury of his peers.

On the occasion of a 1928 retrospective in Paris, the French writer Raymond Queneau ventured wryly that de Chirico’s oeuvre could be divided in two: “the early and the bad.” Such was the verdict passed down by Surrealist artists and authors, who accused the artist of betraying the imagination to which he lent such vital, visual form. Even as de Chirico elaborated new styles, critics clung to Metaphysical painting as the benchmark of his talent, or, more precisely, the yardstick by which to measure its dissipation. The first two monographs on the painter – James Thrall Soby’s The Early Chirico (1941) and Italo Faldi’s Il Primo De Chirico (1949) – proposed a clean break between the “first” de Chirico and his entire post-1919 output: a notion that has held sway ever since. As some art historians have recently (and rightly) insisted, de Chirico’s work cannot be so neatly slotted into such categories. After all, his “late” work constitutes nearly a lifetime of subsequent effort; and while the artist’s imagery undeniably shifted after World War One, his novels and essays from the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s reveal a striking continuity with his earliest theoretical sympathies.

In fact, de Chirico penned some of his most articulate syntheses of Metaphysical theory precisely around the time that he began abandoning it in paint: in 1919 he published not only his important essay “On Metaphysical Art,” but also “We Metaphysicians” and “Metaphysical Art and Occult Sciences” – texts still unavailable in English and understudied in Anglo-American scholarship (and which receive extensive treatment in these pages). Copying his own early canvases ad infinitum, declaring certain authenticated works fake, and back-dating a host of paintings, de Chirico further complicated the question of his mature work’s originality and anachronism – gambits alternatively celebrated as proto-post-modern or maligned as disingenuous. The market, in any case, remains flooded with erroneously dated images. And the pastiches, self-citations, and outright kitsch of many of his post-Metaphysical images continue to bounce around art history’s kangaroo court. Defended by the likes of both the arch-avant-gardist Marcel Duchamp and the philo-Fascist critic Waldemar George, the more vexing dimensions of that “later” corpus are not likely to be adjudicated any time soon. This book proffers little evidence to that end.

For, even de Chirico’s Metaphysical paintings – the bulk of them completed in Paris on the eve of World War One – remain plagued by misapprehension; even the imagery he honed in the heart of avant-garde Montparnasse skirts the ins and outs of avant-garde belonging. Museums still hang Metaphysical paintings alongside Surrealist or Neoclassical images, when in fact they were painted a good decade earlier. Often confused with the “Pittura Metafisica” he developed in wartime Ferrara with fellow painter Carlo Carrà, de Chirico’s Metaphysical designation had already emerged in Paris, well before the War’s outbreak. For all their abiding strangeness, these scenes have come to labor under too familiar epithets, chief among them dream and memory, melancholy and nostalgia, Fascism and Surrealism. “The Surrealist painter?” “Ah yes, you mean the Fascist painter!” Such were the most common rejoinders to de Chirico’s name whenever the subject of this book arose, whether in casual conversation or academic circles. That an artist who was neither of these is still taken for both: such an incongruity drives this book’s chief concerns. How, it asks, could the same images come to serve such different ideological programs? How do these scenes disavow “the necessary dirt of politics” while inviting its ceaseless projection? Giorgio de Chirico and the Metaphysical City takes seriously the place of ideology in these cityscapes – in their formal economy as much as their iconography – without ascribing it the reassuring specificity of a name.

One proper name, however, haunts every page. In spite of the longstanding recognition of de Chirico’s debts to Friedrich Nietzsche’s writings, we have lacked a comprehensive study of how he read, misread, and explored that philosophy in visual form. The recent recognition of de Chirico as a “Nietzschean painter” by scholars such as Matthew Gale and Cathy Gere signals a welcome shift, one to which this book hopes to contribute. Of course, even in its aptness, the term raises questions of its own. Of which Nietzsche are we speaking, and why does it matter? It is the late Nietzsche to whom de Chirico paid particular attention – the post-Wagnerian Nietzsche of limpid skies and hard outlines, as much as of myth, metaphor, and pre-Socratic mysticism. Even still, “the Nietzsche we love,” to borrow George Steiner’s expression, forms the obverse of a far more problematic philosopher; scholars like Geoff Waite meanwhile insist that we not lift Nietzsche’s playfully metaphorical baby out of its frequently noxious bathwater.

The de Chirico we love is also, alas, the artist we must address more critically. This perhaps accounts for something of the book’s tack and tone, somewhere between respect and circumspection: on the one hand, a wish to do verbal justice to the poetics of de Chirico’s silence; on the other, a need to put some flesh back onto the voluntary poverty of those spaces, to interrogate what (and how) their absences mean in and of themselves. To seize more firmly these paintings’ philosophical and political economy means approaching them in an extra-moral sense, beyond the well-worn art-historical poles of truth and lies, good and evil, inside and out.

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