In Which They Were The Vagabonds of the Art World

The Surrealists and Me

by GIORGIO DE CHIRICO

I reached Paris in the autumn of 1925. The great orgy of painting was raging in the French capital. The dealers had instituted a real dictatorship. It was they who, with their hired art critics, created or destroyed a painter, and that independently of his value as an artist. In this way a dealer, or a group of dealers, could create extremely high prices for the canvases of a painter completely lacking in even the slightest genius, make his name famous in every continent, while they could also boycott, suppress and reduce to poverty an artist of great value. The dealers did all this by taking advantage of the confusion which reigned and unfortunately reigns more than ever in the art world, and by ignominiously exploiting the snobbery and imbecility of a certain category of people.

Their clientele consisted especially of Anglo-Saxons, who were acutely snobbish, and especially of North Americans; their clients also included a few Scandinavians, a few Germans, several Swiss, a few Belgians, and a few Japanese. French clients were fairly limited in number, while Spanish and Italians were even fewer. It must be said in our favour and to our credit that these Italians were taken in less than everyone else.

Between the dealers and those who surrounded them existed a real freemasonry with its rites, rules and procedures, which functioned wonderfully well. One famous trick consisted of false auction sales at the Hotel Drouot. A dealer would decide, for example, that the works of a certain painter, whom he supported, were extremely expensive. He would put one of these paintings up for auction at the Hotel Drouot, the painting in question usually belonging to a collector who was in league with the dealer.

The dealer would send a few of his own men to the sale and they would push up the price of the painting, while the dealer would naturally sacrifice a certain sum to pay the commissions due to the auctioneers. In this way the impression was given that the picture has sold for a very high price, while in fact it had not been sold for any price. Then it would be left lying for a certain time in the back room of the dealer's shop or in the collector's cellars.

Never, since the beginning of the world, since men have exerted themselves drawing, painting, modelling and sculpting, never I say, have the highest values of the spirit and the highest aspirations of mankind, namely art and works of art, reached such a state and in this way been prostituted and dragged through the mud.

There are two great scandals of our time: the encouragement given to what is bad in art and the fact that there is no opposition to this encouragement by any authority, either civil or ecclesiastical. At the same time there is speculation based on deceit, even on swindling, which takes advantage of the ignorance, vanity and stupidity of the men of today. All this had and still has one sole purpose, one sole motivation: money - to earn money at all costs, to earn it in any way, under the aegis of a false artistic ideal. I accuse openly and courageously all the shameful gang who have helped and are still helping to make painting decline to the point to which it has declined today.

I accuse them today and tomorrow and assume full responsibility for such an accusation. I am sure that the efforts I am making and perhaps somebody else is making to restore painting to a level of nobility and dignity, will not be in vain.

I am not a theoretician, nor someone who makes empty speeches; I am speaking like this because I have studied and examined the problem deeply. Other people, too, have spoken and written about the decadence of modern painting, but these are people who understand up to only a certain point and have not been able to put their finger on the trouble, as I have been able to. Also, before one really has the right to speak in such a way, one must in the first place be a painter of great intelligence and one must have been capable of painting the paintings which only I have succeeded in painting in the first half of our century.

The present method of dealing with art, the method used by fools, thieves and pimps has since spread throughout the entire world, but the origin and centre of it all were in Paris.

Now that I have written frankly what I think of modern painting and of those who have supported it and spread it abroad and are still doing so, I will return to my memories, observations, reflections and personal adventures.

Soon after reaching Paris I found strong opposition from that group of degenerates, hooligans, childish layabouts, onanists and spineless people who had pompously styled themselves surrealists and also talked about 'the surrealist revolution' and the 'surrealist movement.' This group of not very worthy individuals was led by self-styled poet who answered to the name of André Breton and whose aide-de-camp was another pseudo-poet called Paul Eluard, a colourless and commonplace young man with a crooked nose and a face somewhere between that of an onanist and a mystical cretin.

After the First World War, M. André Breton, together with a few surrealists, had bought at auction sales, for low prices, a certain number of my paintings that I had left in a little studio in Montparnasse when I had gone to Italy. In order to earn the rent, the owner of the studio had sold my paintings, together with a little furniture which had remained there. M. Breton and his acolytes hoped that I would remain in Italy, that I would die in the war, that in some way I would no longer appear on the banks of the Seine, and in this way they would have been able to quietly and gradually to pick up all the paintings of mine in Paris, since later, in addition to those which were sent to the saleroom by the owner of the studio, the surrealists acquired paintings of mine even from private individuals, and especially from Paul Guillaume, the man in love with Derain, who stupidly sold them various paintings of mine which I had sold to him between 1913-1915.

In this way the surrealists had hoped to monopolise my metaphysical painting, which naturally they called surrealist, and then, by means of publicity, articles and a whole system of skillfully organized bluff, they hoped to do what dealers had done earlier with Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Rousseau and Modigliani, that is to sell my paintings at extremely high prices and pocket stacks of money.

They were so persistent, so hysterical in their envy - which resembled that of eunuchs and olds maids - that they were not content with boycotting my works in Paris upon my return, but organized, through their representatives and agents aboard, large-scale boycotts of my work also in Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, Britain and the United States. Their silliness then reached the point of doing things of this type. When my exhibition at the Rosenberg Gallery and the exhibition of my metaphysical paintings arranged by the surrealists at their gallery in the Rue Jacques Callot opened more or less at the same time, the surrealists organized a kind of parody of the work I was showing at the Rosenberg Gallery in the window of the other one. the result, however, was that this parody in the window of the surrealists' gallery provided great publicity for my show at the Rosenberg and I sold many pictures, which gave the pseudo-poet André Breton a liver attack.

In spite of the hysterical envy of the surrealists and the other agitated failures living in the French capital, my new painting aroused great interest, but I cannot say that the intellectuals put themselves out to support it. The only intellectual who supported me at that time with a certain warmth was Jean Cocteau, but I think he did so more to spite the surrealists than for any other reason; in fact, I realised later that even he was not worth much more than the surrealists.

At first the surrealists had been full of envy because Jean had made something for himself in snobbish Parisian circles, but when Cocteau supported my new painting they became absolutely hydrophobic and resorted to methods which could be called sordid and squalid in the worst possible way. For example, they would make anonymous telephone calls in the middle of the night to Cocteau's elderly mother, who was an extremely fine lady, full of good-hearted kindness, in order to tell her that her son had ended up under a motor car.

cocteauI am very grateful to Jean Cocteau for the interest he has shown in me, but I must say that I do not in fact approve of the kind of praise he accords me and the interpretation he likes to put on my pictures. Moreover, I have always found myself in the difficult position of having to side against even my friends, even those few who have said and still say nice things about my painting. I must unfortunately and most regretfully say this, because even many people who are favourably disposed towards me do not understand anything about my painting.

Giorgio de Chirico died in Rome in 1978. The above excerpt is from his autobiography, The Memoirs of Giorgio de Chirico, translated by Margaret Crosland.

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