Friday, March 15, 2013

De Chirico's Gladiators

We took a trip to Italy a few weeks ago and in Verona I bought a monograph on De Chirico. De Chirico is a peculiar case in that his early paintings were highly successful, but then in the 1920s he moved to Paris to join with the Surrealists. He quickly came to feel that Breton was overbearing and that many of the Surrealists were fakers and he went on his own highly iconoclastic way from then on, painting Neoclassical self-portraits dressed in historical costumes, or copies of various old master paintings. He was also known for making copies of his earlier work, like Dali would do as well. In some ways it appeared he had gone off the rails and lost his way.



In the late-1920s De Chirico turned to the neo-classical and changed his style. He began a series of gladiator paintings, perhaps as a reaction to the rise of Mussolini, and also perhaps to Picasso as well. Italy was always central to De Chirico's work, the piles of accumulated junk and objects in his work symbolised the archaeological accretions of history in Italy. In a way De Chirico's use of static figures in his Metaphysical painting was a rejection of the cult of speed, power and technology in the proto-fascistic Futurists. And it has been argued that the elongated flacid interlinked bodies of his gladiators was again a kind of tongue-in-cheek response to the cult of masculinity so prevalent in Italian culture.



The gladiators were produced for the Casa Rosenberg, the Parisian apartment of the Rosenberg brothers, art dealers and connoisseurs, who supported Max Ernst, Francis Picabia, and many others, and commisioned series from these artists to fill their home I wonder what became of their collection and these gladiator paintings after the German occupation of Paris. Did the Rosenbergs escape to the USA? I'm not sure. There is a pdf online detailing letters between De Chirico and the Rosenbergs which focuses on art dealing and the looming economic crash of 1929. Dark days indeed .. the end of the interwar era.



Its not a simple issue for artists to change their style. Chagall, for example, became burdened by his popular style and was forced to churn out his idyllic charming work for collectors. Still a pretty good job, but he was fearful to change his approach too radically. De Chirico'a figures are handled quite roughly, there's a purposeful naivete in the work, it looks very much like a precursor to Philip Guston's paintings from the '40s of school children doing battle on the street. The homosocial undertones are also quite risky for the artist. Anyone working this way today would be labelled as queer, or at least stereotyped. It seems the late 20s/early 30s was in many ways a high point in Modernist experimentation, culturally and socially, much like 1917-1925 had been in Russia. All this was swept aside by World War II. Now these paintings that survived are like relics of a distant age. De Chirico strikes me as an anti-modernist, in a way, in his penchant for Old Master painting and his dandified, aristocratic style, But he also faces into the future as an early post-modernist who was willing to take great risks in his work. The later De Chirico remains problematic because it is hard to classify, but in retropect that becomes a strength. A strength born out of tenderness, a strength that bends and is flexible, not rigid and unbending like a cannon. He represents an alternative Modernism, one that adapts and reflects on history and the mysteries of time and experience.

links on De Chirico:

essay on De Chirico's Gladiator series on Google Books here

good article here

a New Yorker article here. Scroll back to page 67

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