Museo Carlo Bilotti 2025: De Chirico and Warhol in the Borghese Orangery

Why de Chirico's later career was the most bitter argument in 20th-century Italian art history

De Chirico's public position from the 1930s onward — that the Neo-Classical and Neo-Baroque works he was producing were superior to, or at least continuous with, his celebrated Metaphysical period — created one of the most sustained critical conflicts in Italian art history. The Surrealists (who had adopted his early work as a founding inspiration) rejected the later work as reactionary betrayal. De Chirico rejected the Surrealists as misreaders of his original intent. The specific irony: de Chirico spent his later decades producing copies of his own Metaphysical works (authenticated by himself, dated earlier than their actual production, sold to collectors who wanted "early de Chirico") while simultaneously arguing in print that the later Neo-Classical work was his most significant achievement. The forgery issue (if copies of your own work count as forgeries, which the art market holds they do if falsely dated) became inseparable from the aesthetic argument. The Bilotti collection's inclusion of works from multiple periods allows the visitor to assess the actual visual evidence — whether the later work is continuous with or a betrayal of the earlier — without relying entirely on the critical consensus that sided with Surrealism.