Artistic rivalry was fundamental to the work of the Greek-born Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico. In this paper, which examines de Chirico’ frequent rivalries with his contemporaries, I analyse a selection of de Chirico’ canvases from the 1920s and 1930s which emulate the work of old masters in the light of Rene Girard’ theory of “imetic desire.”I
De Chirico’ work was often the subject of intense rivalry between himself and other artists. In 1919, when Carlo Carra published his book Metaphysical Art, a publication that gave de Chirico a relatively less important role in the formation of the “metaphysical” art movement in comparison to Carra a difficult falling out between the two artists ensued. A similar dispute soon arose between de Chirico and the leader of the French surrealist movement, Andre Breton. Although Breton had once seen de Chirico’ paintings as the harbinger of a new “odern mythology”based on uncanny juxtapositions of objects, by the mid-1920s when de Chirico began to make explicit references to old master paintings, Breton subjected the painter to a savage critique for producing, among other things, “idiculous copies of Raphael.”De Chirico for his part would subject Breton to a similarly scathing assessment in his later writings. These disputes and disagreements were only two of many artistic rivalries throughout de Chirico’ career.
These rivalries reached fever pitch in the 1920s and 1930s, a period in which de Chirico’ early, metaphysical work came under attack. His early work was mocked and parodied by younger artists, such as Gino Bonichi [Scipione] who depicted de Chirico’ famous manikins as ordinary objects thereby stripping them of their mystery, leading de Chirico to complain that the artist’ caricatures were directed against him. These criticism would culminate in the official fascist press in the late 1930s where de Chirico’s work was condemned for being “oreign, Jewish and Bolshevik.”During this same period, however, the artist abandoned his early metaphysical style and set himself the task of trying to rival and emulate the work of old masters. Copying the work of some of the most significant painters throughout history, including Raphael and Rubens but also Renoir, beginning in 1920 de Chirico demonstrated the superiority of the inherited traditions of western culture while creating a sense of his own failure and inadequacy which has persisted to this day.
These works have puzzled scholars for their slavish dependence on the work of other artists. I interpret them through Rene Girard’ text Violence and the Sacred. There Girard formulates the theory of “imetic desire” a social scenario in which people"s needs and wants mimic each other to the point where conflict and violence are the result. As I argue, for de Chirico, a dissolution of categories flowed from modernity’s erasure of the difference between the culturally privileged work and the banal, everyday object. This meant that everyone in society was essentially chasing the same thing and mimetic desire threatened catastrophic conflict. De Chirico’s obsessive repetition of old masters was an attempt to reassert the primacy of distinction within modern art by reintroducing hierarchies of difference which work to quell mimetic desire. However, at another level, he exacerbated such desire by relativizing the old masters and making his work as much like theirs as possible. Subsequently, in a series of Gladiator paintings of the later 1920s, he would resolve this issue by offering himself as the perpetually inadequate painter whose “acrifice”focuses the socially destabilising energies of mimetic desire and thereby absorbs them. Rather than a simple rejection of modernity or a heedless loss of quality, therefore, de Chirico’ unusual paintings after old masters were deeply dependent on the experience of rivalry and were an attempt to avoid rivalry’ socially deleterious effects.