Giorgio De CHIRICO (1888-1978). Autograph manuscript signed, - Lot 9

Giorgio De CHIRICO (1888-1978). Autograph manuscript signed, Il monomaco parla, Florence April 1922; 20pages small in-4; in Italian. Important polemical text on painting. Long unpublished, it was collected in 1985 in Il meccanismo del pensiero (pp. 119-124), then in 2008 in Scritti/1 (pp. 786-793). Chirico reports on the great exhibition Mostra della Pittura Italiana del Seicento e Settecento, featuring 1,500 works at the Palazzo Pitti. From this monstrous exhibition, Chirico focuses on the works of Caravaggio, underlining the affinities of the great Lombard's best works with the last French academicism represented by Léon Bonnat, seeing in the Morte della Madonna the origin of a certain academicism that finds its perfect conclusion in Stefano Ussi's Cacciata del duca d'Atene. He denounced the futility of Seicento painting: Caravaggio's figures, which all have a family resemblance, cannot rival the emotion of El Greco's. He criticizes Caravaggio for his stupid faces, his bituminous and dirty canvases, sad and dull, etc., which can't compete with the works of Greco, This exhibition offers an opportunity to discover in certain masters of the great century the origin of so many of the ills that afflict painting today and constitute the leitmotif of modern painting right up to the Secession, Divisionism and Impressionism... Then Chirico attacks the nullity of the small 18th-century masters, who cannot interest the modern man... Far be it from him, however, to shock or irritate his fellow man. But he will continue to admonish, firmly and freely, both the ancients and the moderns. He concludes by deploring the controversy sparked off by Mario Bacchelli... The title "monomaque" aptly defines his position in the battle he is waging alone. Provenance: former Mario Broglio collection (1891-1948).