Real, Fake & Real Fake

The ghostly landscapes and empty plazas that Giorgio De Chirico painted in the decade before 1920 rank the Italian artist as the most influential forerunner of surrealism. In the late '20s his paintings were so much in demand that he secretly took to selling them himself, circumventing an exclusive contract with a Paris dealer. The dealer promptly retaliated by selling De Chiricos so cheap that the artist swore lifelong vengeance on all art dealers as unscrupulous leeches.

After a painful self-examination. De Chirico emerged in 1930, at the age of 41, with a radical change of style: a neoclassic Rubens-like technique featuring long-maned nudes, long-maned horses, knights in armor, and a series of self-portraits, some clothed in fancy dress and some in flabby flesh. To the artist's bitter dismay, his one-man revolution, aimed at the "horrible bestiality called modern art," failed to spark a following. Cognoscenti shunned the new technique and subject matter; De Chirico stubbornly stuck to his anachronistic style.

Pre-Dated Paintings. When fake De Chiricos, done in his easily imitated earlier "metaphysical" style, began to flood the art market, the canny, cantankerous artist began to see the shape of things to come. Encouraged by friends, he painted early De Chiricos himself, even predating some of them until he was threatened with legal action. Between the phony forgers and the "genuine" forger, who to this day can turn out 20 paintings a month, confusion reigned.

Time after time, De Chirico publicly labeled works signed with his name as spurious and got them "sequestered"-a legal action whereby police seize a painting until a court can judge its authenticity.

Most of the time he was right, though courts have occasionally ruled that he really painted some work he said was faked. One authoritative Milan art critic estimated last week that "sixty percent of the paintings he sequesters are really fakes. Thirty percent he painted himself, and ten percent he painted himself but has forgotten about and is denouncing in good faith."

Wonderfully Disgraceful. The newest De Chirico malediction involved Milan's respected Brera Galleria, which last week put up for sale 248 examples of modern art that included six De Chiricos, two of them in his metaphysical style. Strolling through the exhibit before the sale, white-thatched De Chirico, now 72. was spotted by an attendant who asked: "Maestro, if you were on a sinking ship with these six paintings, vhich one would you save?" "I'd save them all," replied the maestro, and promptly went about "saving" one.

He called the police, insisted they sequester an early-style oil called Il Trovatore.

The only authentic thing about it, said De Chirico, was the signature; he insisted that the rest of it had been overpainted on one of his neoclassic efforts by some art faker.

"Publicity stunt." snorted the gallery manager, Professor Sergio Franciscone. who threatened to sue the artist.

But U.S. Critic James Thrall Soby, author of the definitive study Giorgio de Chirico, said that "if I had to bet my hunch, I'd say that De Chirico is probably telling the truth." Critic Soby speaks from experience mixed with compassion. Fifteen years ago, he made a pledge that he still keeps: to defend Painter De Chirico "against all comers, including his aging, naked, grandiose, disgraceful, his rather wonderful self.''

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