Giorgio de Chirico/Isabella Far, 'Theater Performance' (1942/45)
[Article]
Greeley, Anne Lindsey
This article--originally published in 1942, and reprinted in the artist's 1945 volume, Commedia dell'arte moderna--comprises de Chirico's first and most extensive discourse on the subject of theater. In this revealing essay, de Chirico speaks to the metaphysical power of theater; to theater as the fulfilment of man's primeval need for a preternatural world; to the futility of realist and open-air theater in their failure to liberate the spectator from reality; to the absurdity of modernist theater in its enslavement to novelty and fashion; and to the proper use of the mannequin, so execrably exploited on the modernist stage.