Giorgio de Chirico in 'The Critic's Notebook'

“Giorgio de Chirico: Horses: The Death of a Rider” at Vito Schnabel Gallery, New York (through May 20): These are the final weeks to wrangle “Horses: The Death of a Rider” at New York’s Vito Schnabel Gallery. The exhibition of sixteen paintings by Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978) reveals a different side of the Italian master and his haunting surrealist cityscapes of the 1910s. With work here from the 1920s through the 1970s, the assembly shows an artist increasingly interested in the symbolism of mythology and antiquity. Like other moderns who took a classical turn after World War I, de Chirico focused on war horses and their riders in dreamlike imagery that appear out of time and place. For de Chirico, the way forward was a return path through art history.