Of Mythological proportions

Almost all of us carry as mental baggage some visual imagery that resonates, frequently if not obsessively, throughout our lives. Whether it is a glimpse of a girl in a white dress on the ferry boat on a spring morning, a haunting scene of the inside of a barn, or a rain-drenched deserted city street, these images become more meaningful with time, even if their mystery remains unexplained.

Thus for Giorgio de Chirico, the brilliant painter who preceded the Surrealist movement, a scene that combined many of his early images remained with him for life. That scene centers on an Italian piazza, perhaps in the late afternoon with long, deep shadows. Ariadne, a reclining figure of Greek mythology, is in the center foreground, while in the background a train driven by a pluming steam engine hurries along behind a tower.

These images are part of a special and specialized exhibition currently at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through Jan. 5 entitled "Giorgio de Chirico and the Myth of Ariadne."

De Chirico, an Italian, was born in 1888 and partly raised in Greece, where his father was an engineer who planned and built railroads. De Chirico studied in Munich under the influence of Arnold Boecklin, a Symbolist painter. In his 20s, de Chirico began a series of paintings that form the core of this current exhibition. These works, part of his so-called pittura metafisica phase, had as their foundation Ariadne and her myth.

Ariadne was the daughter of King Minos of Crete, who assisted Prince Theseus of Athens to kill the deadly Minotaur. According to the myth, Ariadne helped Theseus to escape the Minotaur’s maze by giving him golden thread to find his way out of the labyrinth. Theseus promised to marry Ariadne, but left her on the island of Naxos, where she finally was rescued by the god Dionysus. It has been suggested that de Chirico was drawn to the Ariadne myth by the metaphor of the golden thread being the path toward the resolution of personal and artistic complexities.

The early Ariadne series was championed by modern artists in Paris just after World War I and de Chirico became for a time the focus of critical acclaim and attention in the intellectual salon hosted by the influential critic and poet Guillaume Apollinaire. In Paris in those days, de Chirico was a contemporary of Picasso, Modigliani and Brancusi. He was a major influence on such Surrealist painters as Max Ernst, Salvador Dali and Rene Magritte.

Sometime after 1918, things went awry for de Chirico. He began to rant against modern art, took to a painting style of the Old Masters — becoming in the process a mediocre academic painter — and, in general, lost the inspiration and brilliance of his earlier career. During this period, he also alienated most of his friends and supporters with a combination of condemning modern painters, producing second-rate work and, finally, by proclaiming himself to be the greatest painter of all time.

In the 1930s, de Chirico began a second phase of Ariadne paintings, many of which are also on display. There are several different views of these works. One is that he returned to his old inspiration and produced many copies of his own work in an early rendition of what later would become " serial" art in the form of multiples by Andy Warhol. Another view is that he needed the money and often would "discover" under his bed a canvas from pre-war days with an Ariadne theme. It is certain that he often misdated this second series.

All of the brilliance and emotional drama of the first series is absent from the second, which takes on an increasingly paint-by-the-numbers quality with the static colors and forms of a children’s coloring book. The power of such works as The Melancholy of a Beautiful Day, painted in 1913, is never regained.

In all, eight paintings are reunited for the first time of the early Ariadne series along with another 18 of the later Ariadne works, which allows for a comparison of the two time periods.

During his career, de Chirico branched out into theatrical sets and, despite his contentious relationship with the rest of the modern art world, he exerted a powerful influence over later generations in painting, film, music, advertising and design.

This enormously valuable exhibition was organized by Michael Taylor, associate curator of modern and contemporary art, and in part inspired by the museum’s ownership of one of the early Ariadne works, The Soothsayer’s Recompense, painted in 1913.

Giorgio de Chirico and the Myth of Ariadne
Through Jan. 5
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street
215-763-8100
www.philamuseum.org
Museum admission: $10 general; $7 seniors, students and ages 5-18; pay what you wish on Sundays