Page 22 - Studio International - February 1968

in an exhibition of Surrealism, but if Bacon and Suther-
land could be included, a place might well have been
found for Paul Nash, historically a more easily justified
choice. The title of the exhibition implies an interpretation
of Surrealism which Nash would have wholeheartedly
approved, and he would by no means have disgraced
a gathering which included Sironi, Roy, Brauner,
Scipione, Dominguez and Oelze inter alia. A well-chosen
painting by Nash might have illustrated one interesting
point : the widespread dissemination and influence, in
Europe around 1930, of Chirico's now discredited work
of the 1920s.
There is, of course, a very good excuse for most of the
omissions from this exhibition. Collectors who will lend
happily to New York, to Paris or to London, will not
part quite so confidently with their treasures for a long
exhibition in a little-known civic gallery in Turin. The
organizers of 'Le Muse Inquietanti' will draw great com-
fort from the fact that, in staging an exhibition which
contains so many indisputable masterpieces, they will
have helped very considerably to redress this position. A
really strong and splendidly varied showing of Chirico,
including later works which show that he was still a force
to be reckoned with after 1917; a collection of works by
Ernst which, if far from comprehensive, included some
rare early pieces and some stunningly beautiful and
disturbing paintings from the 1920s; a dozen Mir& of the
most poetic period (1924-7) ; a selection of Magrittes of
which all were fascinating and several were of the very
best; there is no arguing with sheer quality and it is very
often an exhibition of this kind which makes quality
easiest to discern and to enjoy. If this exhibition is to be
followed, at intervals, by others of a similar scope and
interest, those responsible will have succeeded in putting
Turin on the cultural map; or perhaps one should say
reinstating it, in view of the city's role in the genesis of
Surrealism and thus of modern European art.
It was Turin, where he came first when he moved to
Italy in 1909 (after a childhood spent in Greece followed
by three years in Munich), that furnished Chirico with
much of the background for his early paintings, an empty
stage upon which to play out strange psychic dramas. It is
difficult at first to reconcile the town with the paintings it
inspired, but after a while one can sense, in the wide,
inhuman Napoleonic streets and under the heavy sky—a
strange mixture of Alpine clarity and industrial pall— the
combination of menace and nostalgia which is so typical
of Chirico's paintings.
Of course this combination was not entirely new in art.
A painting by Böcklin, reproduced in the catalogue but
unfortunately not sent from Basle for the exhibition,
illustrates very clearly Chirico's debt to the Swiss painter,
whose work he had studied in Munich: the figure of
Ulysses from Böcklin's Ulysses and Calypso of 1883 is lifted
into Chirico's Enigma of the Oracle of 1910, and may have
had considerable influence in opening the Italian painter's
eyes to the ambiguities latent in the relationship between
statues and their human originals.
There is no doubt that the best Chiricos are fine paint-
ings. In terms of composition and tone they are extra-
ordinarily skillful. But there is something very awkward,
distasteful even, about the use of such antique and con-