Is Giorgio de Chirico’s fifty-year battle with the Surrealists emblematic of the polarities that still exist today with regards to formalism versus “organicism”? Is this dichotomy the difference between leftism and conservatism, in art and literature?

I don’t think that Giorgio de Chirico’s battle with the surrealism was connected to polarities such as formalism versus organicism, or even leftism and conservatism.

De Chirico was a visionary as a young painter — the best of the surrealist painters. Even today his work has such strong color, construction and disturbing emotional tone that it eclipses most of Dalí, Tanguy or Ernst. Of all the “dream photographs” created by the Surrealist painters, his work remains mysterious and irreducible. There is no formal trick or system that can be deciphered. The feeling eclipses all objective formal analysis. Most art historians can’t even touch him. William Rubin admits this in his article for the de Chirico retrospective in 1982: the “ethos” of the work is beyond the grasp of art history.

The Surrealists classified the hypersensitive and obstinate de Chirico as conservative, when, in sheer naiveté, he turned towards the conservative principle of Renaissance “technique”, later using it to distinguish himself from the Surrealists. I cannot imagine how painful it was for a sensitive artist such as de Chirico to have his work picketed in Paris by his former colleagues, who had formerly idolized him. What a betrayal. And of course he was a bit of a nut case in his writings, which are a fifty-year argument with Breton, both of them taking themselves too seriously, and Breton with a hauteur that is a bit offensive. They each felt there was a betrayal — Breton felt that de Chirico had betrayed Surrealism and become a conservative, lugubrious hack; and de Chirico, whose work had inspired so many Surrealists, felt that they had betrayed him by not supporting his new work. Perhaps he was reacting to the many imitators of his work and wanted to do something new. More likely he had mystical experiences when younger, which he describes in his letters and Meditations which he sent to Apollinaire; and then that heightened experience of the world faded for him.

What is the sacredness that is imbued in Surrealist art?

In Surrealism, the sacred appears as a fearsome sense of power and mystery, eros subsumed in numinous experience, subtly emerging as tenderness or love, a focus on the obscure nuance of another’s presence, or as an amoral libidinal energy absorbed from a direct apprehension of reality. It is a profound ambivalence — a sense of attraction and repulsion in the face of nature, a person or a thing. For artist, the sacred arises from the perception of the extraordinary within the ordinary, in letting go of the dependence on sequential reasoning — a direct apprehension of the contradiction embedded in life —attraction/repulsion; beauty/disgust; energy/decay — leading to a perception of mystery. It is the uncanny as an “obscure sense of significance”.

And for the Surrealists themselves?

They avoided thinking about the sacred, except when they invented new forms to express it. They were repulsed by Western religion, and rejected it. Although the Manifestoes claim to lay waste to religion, I think they refer specifically to Catholicism and Christianity. The Surrealists were interested in numerology, the Kabala, and Tibetan Buddhism — Breton wrote an open letter to the Dalai Lama because he knew that Buddhism aimed for a change in consciousness. They were fascinated by non-Western religions that they discovered through ethnography. Miró, for example, was inspired by shamanic Inuit masks, and the anthropology of Levy-Bruhl.

The Surrealists were fascinated by manifestations of sacred power —which is to say a sense of attraction and repulsion, the sense of something breaking through an ordinary experience to open up a new vision or reality. We could say that they saw the sacred as the razor that slices through the eye.