CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 8/28/2019

Posterity has a word to say about Giorgio de Chirico and the changing face of Metaphysical Art

“Metaphysical Interior with Black Oval” (c. 1968) is reproduced from Giorgio de Chirico: The Changing Face of Metaphysical Art, the first major survey on this profoundly influential, yet often maligned, artist in more than two decades. One of de Chirico’s “late” works (rejected by the Surrealists and many others, along with everything else the artist made after his early Metaphysical work of 1910–1918), it looks pretty fresh to many art historians today. Essayist Victoria Noel-Johnson comments on the gradual repositioning of the artist’s legacy in relation to twentieth-century art, acknowledging that “different facets of dechirican theory and practice inspired a number of artistic movements ranging from Dada, Surrealism, Magic Realism, Neue Sachlichkeit, the Novecento, to Pop Art, Transavanguardia and aspects of Postmodernism.” Always able to see many steps ahead, Marcel Duchamp commented as early as 1943 that de Chirico’s “admirers could not follow him and decided that the de Chirico of the second manner had lost the flame of the first. But posterity may have a word to say.”