From a Paris studio to a New York wall
The painting’s life as an object (its provenance, the documented chain of who has owned it, in order, from the artist’s hand to now) is short and clean. It was painted in Paris in mid-1914, weeks before the First World War broke up the city’s avant-garde. De Chirico himself would leave for Italy when the war came, and the small panel passed through the Paris dealer Paul Guillaume (whom Apollinaire had introduced to de Chirico in 1914) and then to the dealer Marcel Raval by 1928, working its way through the European art trade toward America.
Its great owner was Nelson A. Rockefeller (1908–1979), the American collector, philanthropist, and politician (a four-term governor of New York and, briefly, vice president of the United States) and one of the most serious collectors of modern art of his generation. He bought The Song of Love from Raval in October 1950. No purchase figure survives in the record, so the price is unknown.
Rockefeller died in 1979, and in his will he left the painting to the Museum of Modern Artin New York. The credit line on the wall reads, to this day, “Nelson A. Rockefeller Bequest,” and the accession number is 950.1979. There it hangs now, a small upright square a few minutes’ walk from the city’s busiest streets, where a god’s head and a pink glove keep their silent company on a wall.
A last word on what the picture became. De Chirico painted it in 1914 and lived until 1978, long enough to watch the movement he never joined turn his early Metaphysical squares into sacred objects, and long enough to grow prickly about it. He had moved on; the Surrealists kept him frozen as their prophet. But the verdict that matters is the one a single reproduction delivered in 1922, when a young Belgian looked at a printed copy of this square and felt that his eyes had seen the mind for the first time. A small panel, under two and a half feet tall, painted a decade before its movement existed, did the one thing de Chirico always wanted a picture to do: it kept its secret, and made you feel the keeping.