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THE FOUND STYLE

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On a spire raised in secret, a zoning law that drew a skyline, and a style named after it died

Nobody invented art deco. The style that defined the 1920s and 30s issued no manifesto and founded no school, and the name it goes by was already current among dealers when a 28-year-old sale-room correspondent put it on a title page in 1968. Trace its forms to their sources and you leave art behind: the stepped skyscraper was drawn by a light ordinance, the rounded radio by what a resin would consent to be, the lotus by a tomb other people dug up. Modernism was an idea; deco, the verdict runs, was only a look. But where did the look come from?

By Michael Cummins, Editor, October 28, 2026

On October 23, 1929, inside the fire shaft of an unfinished tower on Lexington Avenue, a crew hoisted a steel spire up through the roof and fixed it in place in about ninety minutes. It had arrived in sections and been assembled in secret, inside the building, and the morning after it went up was Black Thursday. Scaffolding hid the crown until the spring. The extra height was given to the press only in November, after the rival tower downtown at 40 Wall Street had topped out, and by then William Van Alen’s Chrysler Building stood 1,046 feet high, the tallest in the world.

The most famous gesture of art deco was made inside a shroud, with no one in the street to see it and no name for it that would last, had anyone looked. The people who made the style called it moderne, when they called it anything. Fifteen months later, at the Society of Beaux-Arts Architects’ ball at the Hotel Astor, under the theme of a Fête Moderne, Van Alen came dressed as his building, with its spire on his head. When the name hasn’t arrived, you can point at the thing, or you can put it on.

Whether a style that nobody authored can be called original, or only recognized, is the question art deco leaves behind.

I

A Style Without a Manifesto

The early twentieth century was the great age of the artistic manifesto: Futurism in 1909, De Stijl in 1918, the Bauhaus in 1919, Surrealism in 1924, each telling you in advance what it was and what it despised. Art deco told you nothing in advance. Its theories came after its forms. The rules of the 1925 exposition, published in 1922, were a door policy rather than a doctrine, admitting only work of new inspiration and real originality and banning imitation of the old styles. Paul Frankl’s skyscraper bookcases were selling years before his book explained them, and Hugh Ferriss published his city of the future seven years after he had drawn its shape. The one theorist who ran ahead was Norman Bel Geddes, whose Horizons popularized streamlining in 1932. Dan Klein, who headed the twentieth-century decorative arts department at Christie’s, put it flatly: “It had no founder, no manifesto, and no philosophy.” It simply happened, he wrote, because the designers of postwar Paris were answering a restructured society, and that is the shrug in which most accounts of the style end.

Its French phase had a lineage it was proud of, the eighteenth-century cabinetmakers, and a debt to the German-speaking world. The luxury of ebony, shagreen and ivory took shape in Paris after the Werkbund showed its rooms at the Salon d’Automne of 1910 and Paul Poiret came home from Vienna in 1911 and opened a workshop. Even the French phase began with something found abroad, and the forms the world now recognizes as deco, the stepped tower and the rounded radio, came later, from further outside still.

The modernists argued relentlessly, and an early printing of the abbreviation is theirs. Le Corbusier had run a series of articles in L’Esprit Nouveau, the magazine he edited with Amédée Ozenfant, under the headline “1925 EXPO. ARTS. DÉCO.”, and in 1925 he collected them as L’Art décoratif d’aujourd’hui. Modern decorative art, ran his refrain, has no decoration, and the things of daily use should be anonymous standard types made by industry. Modernism did not refuse the powder compact. It let the compact in only on its own terms, anonymous, standard and plain, and it had a theory of history and a theory of ethics to explain why. Deco let the compact in as itself, and could only point at a ziggurat and say: look.

The pavilion built to carry the argument, the Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau, opened on July 18, almost three months after the exposition itself: a white box of standard furniture with a tree growing through a hole in its roof, meant to deny decorative art and to show architecture running from the smallest object of use to the house, the street and the city. The organizers put up a fence to hide part of it, and it took the Ministry of Fine Arts to have the fence taken down. The loudest argument made at art deco’s birth was made by its enemy, late, and the hosts tried to keep it out of sight.

II

The Ziggurat Was a By-law

Ask anyone to draw art deco and they will draw a stepped tower, its tiers climbing like a temple into the Manhattan sky, and the romantic explanation is ready to hand. The 1920s were mad for lost civilizations. The Carnegie Institution began work at Chichen Itza in 1924, and Aztec motifs ran up the facade of Joseph Younger’s Kennedy-Warren apartments in Washington. Deco’s designers, the story goes, looked at the stepped pyramids of Yucatán and saw the future.

The unromantic explanation is a zoning resolution. In 1916 New York passed the first comprehensive zoning law in the United States, and light was one of its concerns. The Equitable Building on lower Broadway threw a shadow of some seven acres across its neighbors, and the new law required tall buildings to step back from the street as they rose, so that daylight could still reach the pavement. Architects were not sure what that meant for their designs, so in 1922 Harvey Wiley Corbett asked Hugh Ferriss to draw it.

Ferriss made four drawings. They show no building, only the greatest mass of rentable space the law allowed on a city block, carved back in stages until it became a stepped mountain. He worked in black crayon, pulling tone off with a paper stump and erasing the highlights out, so that the mass seems to loom out of its own weather. The drawings taught architects to read the law not as a restriction but as a source of form; Carol Willis would later write a history of the skyscrapers of New York and Chicago on the premise that form follows finance, and Ferriss’s four sheets are where you can watch it happen. The law did not invent the step, and the Mayan enthusiasm was real. What the law did was make the step the price of bulk. Over a quarter of its lot a tower could rise as high as it liked, which is why the Chrysler’s shaft could climb at all, and the step and the shaft together are the difference between a motif and a skyline.

Ferriss held a contradiction. He illustrated his March 1922 article in The New York Times with drawings from the series, and in it, by Cooper Hewitt’s account, he argued that steel and glass had made the unornamented skyscraper the only truthful one. But in the pen-and-ink fantasies he drew in the same years, the setback towers stand amid the scenery of the ancient Near East and Imperial Rome, and setback skyscrapers were often called modern ziggurats, New York a new Babylon. His article argued for the bare tower while his fantasies dressed it, and the city took the mass and left the argument. The architects dressed the mountain too: eagles on the setbacks, sunbursts on the crowns, and a story about Yucatán. The Mayan temple was not the source of the skyline. It was the alibi.

III

What the Resin Wanted

The materials tell the same story. Deco is usually described as a style that used bakelite, chrome and colored glass, as though its designers had chosen them from a palette. It is nearer the truth to say that the materials used the designers.

Bakelite, the first synthetic plastic, created by Leo Baekeland in 1907, is a thermoset. Once it has cured under heat and pressure it cannot be melted or reshaped; it takes its shape once, in the mold, and the mold has opinions. When Wells Coates designed the round Ekco radio in 1932, the circle fitted the round speaker behind it, and by avoiding sharp edges and corners the case played to the properties of the pressed resin; he did not disguise the machine as a cabinet. Coates was a modernist, the architect of the Isokon flats in Hampstead, and the mold did not ask. It produced the deco curve with a modernist standing over it. The form belonged to neither camp, and only one camp had a doctrine against it.

The colorful sets of the decade were another chemistry, Catalin, cast rather than pressed, and finished by hand, and the decade turned out so many different cases for an economic reason. Radio technology had slowed, the Depression had emptied household budgets, and manufacturers sold new sets by restyling the case. Form followed the sales department.

Gottfried Semper argued in the 1860s that style arises from material, technique and purpose. Alois Riegl answered him in 1893, and by 1901 had a name for the answer, the Kunstwollen, an artistic will that uses materials rather than obeying them. Riegl would say the mold chose nothing: someone chose to make the radio round rather than fight the resin with trim, and that choice is a will like any other. He is right, and the argument survives him. Every style is what its materials will do. Gothic is what stone will do in compression, and modernism is what a cantilever will do. The difference lies not in the causes but in the claim. Modernism bent concrete to a theory and put its name to the result; deco let the resin have its way and claimed nothing. The will was there; it was a will to consent. When the slump emptied household budgets, the style changed shape to sell, and it had no theory to resist with.

IV

The Tomb and the Ship

The motifs came from outside as well, and a tomb shows what kind of thing they were. On November 4, 1922, Howard Carter’s men found a step cut into the floor of the Valley of the Kings, and on the afternoon of the 26th Carter breached a sealed doorway, put a candle through the gap and saw, by his own account, wonderful things. Lord Carnarvon sold the exclusive to The Times, and the unpacking of the tomb ran like a serial. Lotus buds, scarabs and winged discs poured into jewelry and cinema lobbies. Egypt was already in fashion, with Grauman’s Egyptian open in Hollywood a few weeks before the candle, and it was one import among many: the Ballets Russes had reached Paris in 1909 with no excavation behind them, and the Maya, Japanese lacquer and the repertoire of empire fed the style as richly. What the tomb shows is that deco’s motifs were neither invented nor, in the ordinary sense, influences. They were dug up, by other people, for other reasons, and reported in the newspaper.

A ship shows how it ended. The French Line took the hull lines for its next flagship from Vladimir Yourkevitch, a naval architect of the Imperial Russian Navy who had come west as an émigré, and the decorators would work inside the volume his lines enclosed. When the slump came, one British rival was cancelled and another, the future Queen Mary, stood unfinished on the slip; the French, heavily subsidized by their government, carried on. The Normandie was laid down at Saint-Nazaire on January 26, 1931, and launched on October 29, 1932, three years to the day after Black Tuesday. She was not the Depression’s child but its survivor.

Inside, the old luxury made its last stand. Lalique’s twelve illuminated glass pillars and ranks of tall lamps lit a first-class dining room ninety-three meters long, and the comparison repeated ever since is that the room was longer than the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. The vessel that stood for the future was measured against Louis XIV. In New York the alibi had been Mayan; at Saint-Nazaire it was the ancien régime.

She reached New York on August 28, 1939, and was laid up at Pier 88. France declared war six days later, and she never sailed again. The United States seized her in December 1941 and began turning her into a troopship, and on the afternoon of February 9, 1942, she caught fire. Yourkevitch went to the pier and was kept from those in command. Heavy with the water poured in to fight the fire, she rolled onto her side in the Hudson a little before three the next morning. It took eighteen months to right her, and after the war the hull was cut up for scrap. That is how the style went too: in the middle of a conversion to something more useful, and nobody made a speech.

V

The Found Style

The stepped skyline came from a by-law and the curve from a mold; the late manner came out of a slump and the motifs out of the ground. Trace the forms of art deco to their sources and you leave art behind, for law, chemistry, money and a newspaper serial. By the standard modernism set, originality as authorship, the designer imposing a concept on matter, deco has nothing to show. There is an obvious objection, that there were many art decos under one label and “found” is only a flattering word for eclectic. But eclecticism picks. A found style is picked. The circumstances did the choosing, and the designers consented. That may be the original thing about it.

Deco was the first style made by the twentieth century rather than about it. The modernists held a picture of the modern world before the world had properly arrived and built in its image: the machine as moral teacher, the house as a machine for living in, the white wall as hygiene made visible. Deco held no picture. It let the century in through the door, the regulations and the resins and the price of ivory and the discovery that a dead king’s furniture could sell newspapers, and it is a found style in the sense that Duchamp’s urinal is a found object: made elsewhere, for other purposes, and recognized as art only afterwards.

That is why it could go everywhere. Hillier called it “the last of the total styles,” and reckoned its reach from the skyscraper and the liner down to the powder compact and the letter-box. Turn his sentence over and the last total style is the first found one. A theory is also a set of terms. Modernism reached down to the smallest object of use and admitted it only as a type; deco let the powder compact in as itself, because nothing forbade it. Both went everywhere, but modernism’s totality was a conquest and deco’s a permission. It did not lack politics: the 1925 exposition was France’s answer to German design, its exotica came out of empire, and in 2025, the exposition’s centenary, Catherine Slessor charged the style with glossing over turmoil and Edward Denison with letting its glamour conceal the colonial rule under which much of it was built. What it lacked was a prohibition, and a style with no prohibition cannot refuse what it is handed, whether a zoning envelope, a pharaoh or an empire. It was total because it was empty, and it was loved because it was empty. It asked the public to believe nothing. It only asked them to look.

Painting in Art Deco style: a kneeling giant built of black stone and gold piers, stepped like a skyscraper, bearing a great golden sphere that blazes as a sunburst over a city skyline and a reflecting pool, with blank ticker tape drifting past.
The style that could not refuse what it was handed, made for this essay.

Art deco was a style of excavation, and it was excavated in its turn. Modernism got a time of death instead. In 1977 Charles Jencks dated it to 3:32 in the afternoon of July 15, 1972, “or thereabouts,” the moment, he wrote, when the Pruitt-Igoe housing blocks in St. Louis were dynamited; the first blocks had come down that spring, a few months before his date. Even modernism’s death certificate was written afterwards, five years late, by an enemy. Deco never received one. What it received, from admirers, was a name, and the name came with the digging. Since then it can be dug up again whenever a culture tires of ideas and wants something to look at, and last year one online dealer reported that its deco sales had tripled.

The man who did most to dig it up was born in March 1940, seven months into the war that ended it. By the middle of the 1960s Bevis Hillier was the sale-room correspondent of The Times, covering a trade that was already using the name. So, by November 1966, was an article in his own paper, and a year later an essay in Elle. When he wrote his book the style was, by his own account, despised. He did not coin its name. He put it on a title page in 1968, at twenty-eight, and three years later, after his exhibition in Minneapolis, it was the word everyone used. Van Alen had the thing in his hands and no name for it. Hillier had the name and no hand in the thing.

Made without a name, named without a maker.

⁂

The occasion is Dezeen’s Art Deco Centenary series and its A to Z of art deco (April 29, 2025). Bevis Hillier is quoted from his piece for that series (March 10, 2025), and his post at The Times from Contemporary Authors; Dan Klein from his introduction to In the Deco Style, as reprinted by the Art Deco Society of California; Charles Jencks from The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (1977). The spire is from the Skyscraper Museum and the Landmarks Preservation Commission’s designation report; the 1931 ball from the National Archives, Vanity Fair and The Smart Set; the Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau from the Fondation Le Corbusier; the 1916 resolution from the Skyscraper Museum and the Museum of the City of New York; Hugh Ferriss’s drawings and article from Cooper Hewitt, and his fantasy drawings from the Skyscraper Museum; the Ekco radio and Catalin from Cooper Hewitt and the V&A; Carter from the Griffith Institute’s excavation journals; the Normandie from RIBA, the Metropolitan Museum, the Musée Lalique, Shipscribe and American Heritage. The history of the name is from Benton, Benton and Wood’s Art Deco 1910–1939 (2003), at second hand. Quotations keep their sources’ spelling.

Drafted with Claude Opus 5.5; literary editing by Claude Sonnet 5.5; outside literary editing by Claude Fable 5.1. Images generated with Gemini Argon for this essay.

Art & Artists, Criticism, Essays, Literature

EXISTING IN ELSEWHERE

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Giorgio de Chirico and the Italy That Was Never Home

A winter magazine cover borrows his empty piazza to sell crime. Before he was born, the station of his father’s railway at Volos already had its trains and a marble goddess. A Greek-born Italian who had lived in Italy for barely two years, he built his squares in Florence, Turin and Paris, perhaps from parts like these. The square is not a memory but an inheritance, and its long shadow runs from Dante’s empty tomb to a flat on the Piazza di Spagna.

By Michael Cummins, Editor, October 23, 2026

I

The Borrowed Square

Giorgio de Chirico had been an Italian for twenty years before he lived in Italy.

Cover of The Guardian Long Read, Volume Five, Winter 2026, the crime issue: a terracotta tower and balcony, white buildings and palms under a deep blue sky, crows on the rooftops, and a fox in an empty square above a trail of red drops.
The Guardian Long Read, Volume Five, Winter 2026: the crime issue. Cover: The Guardian.

Hold that sentence up beside the Winter 2026 cover of the Guardian Long Read, the crime issue, and the picture begins to shift. A raking shadow falls across empty ground. A tower stands against a flat sky. In the middle distance stands a fox; crows line the rooftops, and a trail of red drops runs down toward the reader. A crime scene needs a culprit and a loss, and the cover supplies both: the fox, and the blood.

The artist has not yet been announced, but the cover shows two influences: the vivid colour of the graphic artist Malika Favre, and the grammar of de Chirico, which has long outlived him. In a 2013 essay Ara Merjian lists a Simpsons Halloween episode in which a beehive’s shadow climbs the wall of a deserted street, and the PlayStation game Ico, whose cover draws on two of his paintings.

De Chirico was already copying it himself. In 1955, announcing James Thrall Soby’s exhibition, the Museum of Modern Art took care to say which girl with a hoop was real: The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street (1914) was the only authentic early painting in which she appears. A version in Rome’s Museo Carlo Bilotti is signed and dated 1948; the museum thinks he painted it in the late 1960s. The grammar the illustrator borrows had already been remade, and backdated, by the man who invented it.

What his squares never had was a culprit. In 1917 Freud set the mourner beside the melancholic. In mourning, he wrote, “it is the world which has become poor and empty”; in melancholia it is the self. The melancholic knows whom, but not what, he has lost. On the afternoon his squares began, de Chirico remembered, the whole world looked “convalescent.” His piazzas have the mourner’s empty world and the melancholic’s unnamed loss, painted by a man who never said what was missing from them.

What was missing was a country, and it was missing because he had never had it. He was not an exile remembering Italy. He was an heir inventing it.

II

Born Beside His Father’s Railway

He was born on 10 July 1888 in Volos, on the Thessalian coast, where ancient Iolcus stood and the Argo sailed. His father, Evaristo, an engineer, had been born in 1841 at Büyükdere, on the Bosphorus. His mother, Gemma Cervetto, came of a Genoese family and was probably born in Smyrna. When the boy was baptised that July, the register entered his father as italo: Italian. On both sides the family had been Italian somewhere else for at least a generation, and the somewhere else was the Ottoman Levant. The citizenship was never in doubt. The country was.

Evaristo had built railways out of Constantinople and across Bulgaria before he came to Thessaly as the engineer in charge of its new line. On 22 April 1884 the first stretch, from Volos to Larissa, opened in the presence of King George I. For the occasion a white marble Athena, the work of an Italian sculptor, was set up at the station.

Four years later his son was born there. Read one way, the parts of the squares were standing in Volos before the painter existed: a station, a train, a marble goddess. De Chirico never said so, but in that reading the trains that cross the horizons of his piazzas, trailing their small white plumes behind high walls, are his father’s trains. In a 2004 essay the archaeologist Paul Zanker ties the Athena to the father as well.

De Chirico liked to compose his origins. An unsigned profile of 1919, attributed to him and written in the third person, gives him a Florentine father and a Genoese mother, and a childhood spent at play beside the sea that saw the Argonauts set sail. The sea was real. The Florentine father was an invention. The son could not make his father more Italian than the register already had, so he gave him an Italian birthplace.

His training was Greek too: from 1903 to 1906 he studied at the Athens Polytechnic. Evaristo died in 1905. In September 1906 Gemma took Giorgio and his younger brother Andrea, the future writer Alberto Savinio, out of Greece. After brief stops in Venice and Milan they went on to Munich, where Giorgio studied painting, looked hard at Böcklin and read Nietzsche. Only in June 1909 did the family settle in Milan. That summer, in his first months of living in Italy, he painted The Departure of the Argonauts. Zanker reads its statue as the Athena of Volos and as the father, with a sacrifice made at its foot, and Orpheus, singing, as the brother. If he is right, it is the first of de Chirico’s pictures to carry a memory of home, and the memory is his father in marble, receiving an offering as the Argo leaves the harbour where the painter was born.

III

The Bench in Santa Croce

One clear autumn afternoon in Florence, still convalescent himself from an intestinal illness, de Chirico sat on a bench in the Piazza Santa Croce. He had seen the square before. But that afternoon, he later wrote in French, it seemed to him that he was seeing everything “pour la première fois”, for the first time, and a painting composed itself before him. It became The Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon, the first of his metaphysical squares.

In the middle of the piazza then, on a high pedestal, stood Enrico Pazzi’s marble Dante, unveiled in 1865. Dante was Florence’s most famous exile, banished in 1302, dead in Ravenna in 1321, and buried there still. Inside the basilica, Stefano Ricci’s monument to him, unveiled in 1830, is a cenotaph, a tomb without a body. It was Dante who taught Italians what exile tastes like. In the Paradiso his ancestor Cacciaguida foretells his banishment:

Tu proverai sì come sa di sale
lo pane altrui, e come è duro calle
lo scendere e ’l salir per l’altrui scale.

You will learn how another’s bread tastes of salt, and how hard a road it is to go down and up another’s stairs.

In the same church lie the bones of Ugo Foscolo. He was born on Zakynthos in 1778 to a Venetian father and a Greek mother, died in exile at Turnham Green in 1827, and was brought to Santa Croce in 1871. Foscolo wrote the sonnet to the island he would never touch again: “Né più mai toccherò le sacre sponde / ove il mio corpo fanciulletto giacque.” Never again shall I touch the sacred shores where my body lay as a child. His Dei Sepolcri praises the tombs of Florence’s great men, which commentators place in Santa Croce, though the poem never names the church.

This is not influence but a constellation, in Walter Benjamin’s sense: a pattern legible only when its points are seen together. Metaphysical painting began with a Greek-born Italian on a bench, facing a statue of Italy’s founding exile, outside a church that holds that exile’s empty tomb and the reburied bones of another Greek-born Italian.

A native cannot see his own square for the first time; only someone arriving can. De Chirico’s revelation is usually read as metaphysics, Nietzsche’s lesson that the most ordinary things are strange. It was also a newcomer’s eye, recast as philosophy. Zanker reads the early squares as mourning for a lost Greek childhood. He may be right that the parts were Greek: the trains, the goddess, the sea. But the eye that looked at them from that bench belonged to a young man arriving in a country that was his only on paper. What he built from Greek parts was Italy.

Nietzsche had found his own city in Turin. He arrived there on 5 April 1888, three months before de Chirico was born, and two days later wrote to Heinrich Köselitz: “Das ist wirklich die Stadt, die ich jetzt brauchen kann!” This really is the city I need now. In 1910 de Chirico’s family moved to Florence, where his mother enrolled both sons with the military district. He passed through Turin in July 1911 on his way to Paris. He would come back, and the second time he would run.

IV

Paris, Capital of an Imagined Italy

He reached Paris on 14 July 1911, Bastille Day. A self-portrait of that year carries a Latin question: Et quid amabo nisi quod aenigma est? What shall I love, if not the enigma?

In 1912 the paper caught up with him: Italy called him up, and he went to Turin to answer. Zanker makes those Turin days, which ended in flight, the birth of the Piazze d’Italia. In de Chirico’s own account, which Zanker quotes, a man comes out into a square. A stone figure watches him as only statues can, a locomotive whistles somewhere behind a wall, and behind the square’s geometry there opens a nostalgia for the infinite. He fled the city that gave him the squares, and painted them from the city he fled to.

In Paris he built Italy from imported parts. Turin lent him its arcades and, in this reading, Volos its trains, though Zanker notes how little the painted squares have to do with the real ones of Turin, Florence or Rome. The Italy he built was nobody’s actual Italy. In the middle of the square he set Ariadne, the Cretan princess Theseus abandoned on Naxos, an island she had not chosen. He took her, Zanker adds, not from the ancient marble or even a cast, but from a line drawing in Salomon Reinach’s repertory of ancient statues, published in Paris in 1897. A Greek figure, on a plinth, in an Italian square, copied from a French book. The titles say the rest: The Nostalgia of the Infinite, Gare Montparnasse (The Melancholy of Departure).

Others were imagining Italy from its edges. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, born in Alexandria, had put Futurism on the front page of Le Figaro. In 1910, in a manifesto signed with Boccioni, Carrà and Russolo, he turned on Venice, the city “che noi pure amammo e possedemmo in un gran sogno nostalgico”: which we too loved and possessed in a great nostalgic dream. The manifesto’s remedy was to fill the canals with the rubble of the old palaces. Marinetti named nostalgia as the enemy; de Chirico wrote it into his titles. One wanted to bury the canals, the other emptied the squares.

Giuseppe Ungaretti, born in Alexandria in 1888 to parents from near Lucca, was in Paris from 1912 to 1914, where Apollinaire befriended him, as he had de Chirico. In a later poem, “Lucca,” his mother in Egypt tells the children about the Tuscan city after the evening rosary: an Italy learned as a bedtime story.

Then the elsewhere moved. When Italy went to war, an amnesty for deserters brought de Chirico home in May 1915, and the army gave him a desk in Ferrara. On Italian soil at last, and in Italian uniform, he stopped painting open squares. The pictures closed into crowded interiors of biscuits, set squares and maps. In 1917 he spent months in a military hospital for nervous disorders, while his brother, posted to Thessaloniki, back on Greek soil, wrote up the voyage as “The Departure of the Argonaut.”

Ungaretti, at the front, put it best. In “Italia,” dated 1 October 1916, he calls himself “un frutto / d’innumerevoli contrasti d’innesti”, a fruit of countless clashing grafts, and rests in his soldier’s uniform “come fosse la culla / di mio padre”, as if it were his father’s cradle. In May 1918, at Campo di Mailly on the French front, he wrote “Girovago”:

In nessuna
parte
di terra
mi posso
accasare

In no part of the earth can I make myself at home. Once these men, de Chirico among them, wore Italy’s uniform, the elsewhere moved with them.

V

The Returns

After the war he stopped arriving and started returning. At the end of 1919, in the Roman review Valori Plastici, he published “Il ritorno al mestiere,” the return to craft, and styled himself Pictor classicus. A self-portrait of 1920, now in Munich, answers the question of 1911: Et quid amabo nisi quod rerum metaphysica est? What shall I love, if not the metaphysics of things? In 1922 he painted The Prodigal Son, in which a father who is a statue lays his hand on the shoulder of a son who is a mannequin. A man with no home in Italy to go back to kept painting homecomings, and the father he came home to was one he had made himself.

In December 1927, after he and his brother, by then living in Paris again, had given interviews to a French paper, the painter and critic Cipriano Efisio Oppo attacked them in Rome’s La Tribuna under the headline “Fuoriuscitismo artistico.” Artistic exile: the press’s word for anti-Fascist émigrés. De Chirico had told the French that modern Italian painting did not exist, apart from Modigliani and himself, “but we are almost French.” Rome called him an exile, as an insult, and Keala Jewell has shown how often the brothers were cast as stateless and unpatriotic. Three years later Savinio declared that his words had been “wickedly distorted” and that the Italian spirit had reawakened, and the brothers, who had been shut out of the 1928 Biennale, showed at the next in a room called “Appels d’Italie”: calls of Italy.

Svetlana Boym defined nostalgia as a longing “for a home that no longer exists or has never existed.” Its restorative kind rebuilds the lost home and takes it for the truth; its reflective kind “thrives in algia,” the longing itself, and keeps putting off the homecoming. The young de Chirico practised the second kind; the old one turned to the first. From 1933 he repainted his early squares, dated some of them back to the 1910s, and called such pictures verifalsi, true fakes. In 1948 he sued the Venice Biennale over its room of metaphysical painting, which included, he declared, a fake Il Trovatore. He won in 1951. A man who forged his own past went to court to disown it.

In 1968, at eighty, he painted The Return of Ulysses. The hero rows a small boat across a patch of sea that lies on the floor of a bourgeois room like a rug. The homecoming has been brought indoors, and it never arrives.

For the last thirty years of his life, until his death on 20 November 1978, he lived at Piazza di Spagna 31. They say, he wrote, that Rome is the centre of the world and the Piazza di Spagna the centre of Rome, so that he and his wife lived at the centre of the centre of the world: “il colmo in fatto di antieccentricità,” the height of anti-eccentricity. It is a square named after another country.

The Piazza di Spagna, emptied, under a deep teal sky: the Spanish Steps rise in bands of rose and white toward the twin towers of Trinità dei Monti and the obelisk, one window lit in a dark palazzo, and in the basin of the Barcaccia fountain a patch of sea where an old man rows a small boat toward the steps.
The centre of the centre of the world: the Piazza di Spagna, made for this essay.

V. S. Naipaul, a Trinidadian of Indian descent in an England he knew from books, named a novel after The Enigma of the Arrival and the Afternoon. His narrator imagines a story for the picture, a book he never writes: a traveller lands at a classical port, is swallowed by the city, and at last finds his way back to the quay to discover that his ship has gone and his life has been lived.

Elsewhere was never a place. It was the direction he faced from wherever he happened to be home.

⁂

The occasion is the Winter 2026 cover of The Guardian Long Read, Volume Five, “The crime issue,” listed for 10 November 2026; its artist has not yet been announced. Ara H. Merjian’s survey of de Chirico’s afterlife is “De Chirico’s ‘Long American Shadow’” (Italian Journal, 2013). The 1955 dating is from the Museum of Modern Art’s press release; the later Mystery and Melancholy of a Street belongs to the Museo Carlo Bilotti. The Volos Athena, The Departure of the Argonauts, the Turin days and the Reinach drawing follow Paul Zanker, “De Chirico und die Traurigkeit der Statuen” (Pegasus 6, 2004), who quotes the Santa Croce passage in de Chirico’s French from Paolo Baldacci; “convalescent” is from the English of the same passage, as quoted by Anthony DiRenzo and The Florentine. The baptismal register and the 1919 profile are from Paolo Picozza’s essay on Evaristo de Chirico (Metaphysical Art 11–13, 2014). The Athens years, the move to Florence, the call-up, the flight and the desk in Ferrara are from the Fondazione Giorgio e Isa de Chirico and Roderick Conway Morris; the 1948 lawsuit from G. Di Giulio’s account of it (Metafisica 22–23). The 1927 interviews, Oppo’s attack and Savinio’s statement are from Lorella Giudici’s account of them (Metaphysical Art 14–16, 2016), whose translations supply “but we are almost French” and “wickedly distorted.” Keala Jewell’s study is The Art of Enigma: The de Chirico Brothers and the Politics of Modernism (2004). The manifesto “Contro Venezia passatista” (1910) is quoted from the text at Memofonte; Svetlana Boym from The Future of Nostalgia (2001); Freud from James Strachey’s translation of “Mourning and Melancholia”; the house on the Piazza di Spagna from the Regione Lazio. Translations from Dante, Foscolo, Marinetti, Ungaretti, Nietzsche, de Chirico’s French, Freud’s German and the Latin are our own. Drafted with Claude Opus 5.5; literary and copy editing by Claude Sonnet 5.5; outside literary editing by Claude Fable 5.1. The header and interior images were generated with Gemini Argon for this essay.

Artificial Intelligence, Essays, Journalism

THE FIRST DRAFT

On the engraving above the desk, and the eyes it takes to see

“…a first rough draft of history that will never be completed about a world we can never really understand.” — Philip Graham, to Newsweek’s correspondents, London, 1963

The first draft of history was never valuable because it was first. It was valuable because someone was there to be wrong — and the machine has now learned to be wrong without ever having been there.

By Michael Cummins, Editor · September 20, 2026

Above the desk of A.G. Sulzberger, the publisher of The New York Times, hangs an engraving of an island. It shows, in his words, “a still-young city in a still-young nation”: cobblestone streets, squat buildings, none taller than a church spire, and a shoreline of working piers crowded with schooners and paddle-steam ferries. There are no bridges and no tunnels. It is New York in 1851 — the year the newspaper published its first issue, four dense pages put together by candlelight in unfinished lofts on Nassau Street, and sold for a penny.

On September 18, 2026, marking the paper’s 175th anniversary, Sulzberger began his commemorative essay not with a figure for subscribers or a boast about reach, but with this picture. His first instinct was to point at an object made by a human being who had looked at a real place. I want to stay with that instinct, because I think it knows something the rest of the essay only partly says.

The engraving is a first draft. It is partial, it is dated, it is bound by an afternoon’s light and by the conventions of a nineteenth-century hand — and, being the work of a human hand, it is wrong somewhere: a proportion, the light, the set of a hull. We do not need to inspect it to know that; that is what a hand is. And it commands our trust for exactly the reason it is limited. Someone stood somewhere and looked, and drew what they saw, and got some of it wrong. That is what a witness is.

Now set beside it a dispatch that ran the day before, on September 17, from the technology publication Futurism. Two reporters, Maggie Harrison Dupré and Jon Christian, spent months inside the operations of a company called Brown Brothers Media, which had built what they called an empire by buying established online publications — a space-news site, a food site, a business site, each with a real audience and a real name — and then dismissing the writers and filling the sites with articles generated by machine. The mastheads stayed. The people went. In their place came experts who had never been born and, presiding over it all, an editor-in-chief whose own age could not hold still from one day to the next.

Set the two objects on the same desk: the engraving of a harbor, made by a hand that saw it, and the news site populated by the unborn, reporting on a world none of them had ever been in. The Times is celebrating a hundred and seventy-five years of human witness at the precise moment the witness is being automated out of the draft. Which raises the question this essay is about. What is the first draft of history when no one was there to draft it?

Bird's-eye view of New York harbor and lower Manhattan in 1851, crowded with sailing ships and paddle steamers, a church spire the tallest point on the island
New York in 1851, as another hand saw it: John Bachmann, “Bird’s Eye View of New-York & Brooklyn,” lithograph, “drawn from nature & on stone,” printed by Endicott & Co., New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Edward W. C. Arnold Collection, Open Access. Not the engraving above the publisher’s desk — a second witness to the same city.

I

The phrase that journalists treat as scripture has no clean lineage, and an essay about the first draft ought to begin by admitting it. We assign the line to Philip Graham, the publisher of The Washington Post, who used it in London in 1963. But Graham had said it before, in a 1953 speech, and before Graham it belonged to Alan Barth, a Post editorial writer who set it down in a 1943 book review in The New Republic — “News is only the first rough draft of history” — and before Barth the etymologist Barry Popik has found the idea in an editorial from 1905. The phrase itself has no first draft. It has many parents, because nearly every journalist wants to believe it. It was passed hand to hand and smoothed like a river stone, and by the time it was famous nobody could say who had first held it.

That is worth knowing, because we have also misremembered what it says. We recall Graham’s sentence as a boast — journalism as the front rank of history, the historians trailing behind. It was not a boast. Read the whole of it: a first rough draft of history “that will never be completed about a world we can never really understand.” Never be completed. Never really understand. Graham was not claiming primacy; he was confessing a limit. The reporter’s draft was doomed to inadequacy from the moment it was filed, and everyone in the trade knew it. Its value was never that it was complete, or even that it was right. Its value was that a person had been present to make it.

The reporter is the finite creature in the room. They mishear the order over the noise, they take a tactical withdrawal for a rout, they file a number that turns out to be wrong by half — and that error is not a scandal but a signature, the friction of a real event meeting a real nervous system under pressure. The draft was valuable not because it was right but because someone was there to be wrong. Correctness is what the second draft is for.

Sulzberger’s anniversary essay carries the phrase in its title — the story of America told, as the Times frames it, in fifteen million first drafts — and uses it, understandably, as an additive monument: the accumulated weight of a hundred and seventy-five years, a daily volume of witness laid brick on brick. But he holds Graham’s humility too, and it is the better half of his essay. The Times, he writes, has “made mistakes, both big and small,” and what it means to be the paper of record is to be “a great and imperfect newspaper steadfastly chronicling a great and imperfect nation.” That is Graham’s confession, inherited and institutionalized. The institution still remembers, in its slogans, that the draft is rough. What the wider culture is forgetting, in practice, is why the roughness was ever worth anything at all.

II

Now look at the draft produced by the machine, as Dupré and Christian found it.

The method is a kind of strip-mining of inherited trust. Brown Brothers Media does not build publications; it buys them — Space Daily, the plant-based lifestyle site VegOut, the European business outlet Silicon Canals, each with a real audience earned over years and a real name — and keeps the name and the audience while replacing the people. The writers are let go. The publishing system is connected to a model. The site goes on producing articles, thousands a month, and the name over the door goes on meaning what it used to mean, to readers who have no way of knowing that the building behind it is empty.

The experts came first. Readers of the space site were offered the authority of a Dr. Katherine Chen, presented as a systems engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and a Dr. James Whitfield, presented as a researcher at the European Space Agency. Neither exists. The ESA confirmed in writing that no such person had ever worked there. They were two of more than fifty invented personas the reporters traced across the company’s sites — writers and specialists conjured whole, with biographies and credentials and nothing behind them.

And then the detail that cracks the enterprise open. Graeme Brown is a real man: the father of the three brothers who own the company, and listed as editor-in-chief of several of its publications. On May 8, an article under his name stated that he was seventy-seven years old. On May 11, in another piece for the same site, he was seventy-five.

A human liar does not age in reverse over three days. A human liar keeps his story straight, because he has a self to protect and a fear of being caught; to lie you must know the truth you are hiding. Nothing like that happened here. The reporters called it, precisely, a “continuity flub.” To the model, seventy-seven and seventy-five are neighboring points in the vicinity of elderly editor, and it forgot Tuesday’s number by Friday because there was no one inside it who had lived through either day. This is the exact inversion of Barth’s rough draft. His correspondent got the number wrong because he was there — pressed, frightened, half-hearing. This number was wrong because no one was there at all. The two errors look identical in print. Everything depends on the difference.

The company’s own scaffolding showed through, too. One article published on the space site opened, in its first sentence, with the words “Now I have all the verified sources I need,” and went on, “Let me write the article with exactly 4-5 inline hyperlinks to real, verified URLs” — the machine’s instructions to itself, shipped as journalism. The age flub proved no one was home. This showed what was home instead: a process narrating its own performance of verification, the counterfeit witness caught rehearsing in the mirror.

And there is a reader on the other end of all this, which is the part that keeps it from being merely absurd. Among the invented writers was one presented as Marlene Martin, a retired English teacher, who produced thousands of first-person essays on loneliness and grief — including a widow’s account of the day a husband’s seven years of caregiving ended overnight. An analyst the reporters consulted noticed that the sites were publishing exactly this kind of confessional, self-help writing, aimed at people who are lonely. Counterfeit witness is not a victimless genre exercise. It manufactures grief that no one felt and sells it to grief that someone does.

When the reporters began asking questions, the company purged the invented names by the hundreds. What replaced them is the truly instructive part. The new bylines were real — the brothers, their father — set atop text that was still generated; the reporters’ term for the arrangement was “meat proxies,” living names affixed to machine-written pieces for the sake of deniability. The counterfeit did not retreat when it was exposed. It moved one layer deeper, behind actual faces. And it was caught, in the end, not by a platform or a filter or a model, but by two people at a publication with people in it, who spent months looking.

After the reporters’ questions, after the purge of the invented names and the arrival of the meat proxies, Brown Brothers Media did one more thing, and it is the image on which the whole case closes. It launched a new site called Sentient Blogs, presented as dedicated to supporting and promoting the work of human bloggers. Its opening essay, under Lachlan Brown’s name, was about fatherhood. Detection software rated it entirely machine-generated. At the bottom sat a disclaimer noting it had been produced with AI assistance. The counterfeit of presence had learned to counterfeit the demand for presence. There is nowhere further for it to go.

III

In his anniversary essay, Sulzberger promises on the paper’s behalf that it “will keep its eyes open.” It is an honorable phrase. But in the presence of a machine that can produce testimony on demand, the question the phrase forces is what it means to have eyes at all.

It cannot mean the ability to register the world. A camera on a lamppost records the license plate, the angle of impact, the time to the second, and no one would say the camera witnessed the collision. It recorded; it saw nothing. Witness is not a perceptual function. It is a condition. To witness is to be the kind of thing that has something at stake — that can be hurt by what it sees, that will have to carry it, that must go on living in the world the event made. Sulzberger’s essay is careful to say what this has cost: colleagues kidnapped, arrested, shot at; one who survived a land mine detonating underfoot, another a helicopter crash. And then a sentence worth quoting exactly because it is short: “Reporters are very often how we know what we know.”

He tells one story in particular. In April 1968 one of the paper’s reporters was in Memphis, at the Lorraine Motel, when Martin Luther King Jr. was shot, and — as Sulzberger recounts — told himself, taking in the scene, Write. Write, write down everything you see. Get it all down. Sulzberger leaves the reporter unnamed, which in an institutional retrospective is understandable; the paper is the protagonist. But this is an essay about witness, and a witness has a name. He was Earl Caldwell, the Times’s national correspondent, one of the first Black reporters on its staff, and the only reporter present. He was a registered guest that night, in Room 214, on the floor below King’s. The day before, King had walked him to the door after an interview and the two had stepped out onto the balcony and lingered there, leaning on the railing, talking; twenty-four hours later, in almost the same spot at almost the same hour, King was struck down.

What Caldwell said about it, decades later, is the epistemology of this essay stated more precisely than I have managed. Reporters believe that if you are there you can see what happens and then tell it, the real story, witnessed firsthand. That night was his lesson in what actually happens. Because he was there, he said in a 2018 interview, he knows that “you don’t see everything” — but he does know the sliver of the truth that came past him, and, in his words, “that’s the basis for what I say.” Writing in the Daily News that same year, on the fiftieth anniversary, he described the images he still carried, “the slivers of memory,” like freeze-framed pictures in his mind. And he set down a grace note that this essay would be poorer without: though he was a registered guest at the motel and a Times reporter at the crime scene moments after the shot, “nobody ever came to ask me if I knew anything or saw anything.” The man who was there was the one no one asked.

That is the whole argument, and it is his, not mine. Barth’s draft was rough; Graham’s understanding could never be completed; Caldwell had only the sliver that came past him. Three formulations of one claim: that presence is partial, that the partiality is honest, and that the honesty is the value. The witness sees less than the camera, moves slower than the crawler, forgets what a database keeps forever. But the witness was there — in a body, at a coordinate, with something to lose — and that is not a limitation on the testimony. It is the testimony.

The machine has read every first draft ever filed. It holds the cadence of the war correspondents and the courtroom reporters and the men who stood on hills to draw harbors, and it can produce, in seconds, an eyewitness account of an event — the smell of it, the sound, the particular thing a mother shouted — that it did not attend, in the voice of a witness who was never born. It is not that the account will be inaccurate. It may be flawless. It is that it will be an eyewitness account of an event that no living eye ever saw.

This is the fourth time this publication has gone looking for something in the machine and found the shape of its absence. We looked for a mind and found the echo of our speech; for beauty and found our forms recombined; for taste and found our rules with no one to break them. Here we look for a witness. The finding is the same, and it is not a technical finding: witness, like taste, is indexed to a life. The machine has all of our testimony and none of our presence. It can draft anything. It cannot have been there.

IV

Look back, one last time, at the engraving above the publisher’s desk — only as he described it, because that is all any of us who have not stood in his office are entitled to say. A still-young city. Squat buildings. A church spire. Schooners and ferries at working piers. It is full of the limits of the person who made it, and it is the most trustworthy object in the room, because it is an honest record of an encounter: someone was somewhere and looked, and set down where their eyes told them the land met the water — and was wrong somewhere, as any hand must be, in a way we can deduce without ever seeing the plate. Those errors are the watermark of a mortal standing at a particular point in the stream of time.

The first draft of history was never endangered by error. It was always full of errors; that was its humility, and every editor who ever spiked a bad lead knew it. We have had, for a very long time, ways to sift and corroborate and correct the honest mistakes of people who were rushed or frightened or partial. What we have not had until now is the other thing — a tide of text that wears the clothes of testimony and was assembled by a process that was present for nothing. The danger is not the wrong number. The danger is the eyewitness account with no eye behind it.

Sulzberger’s phrase is right, and the weight of it sits in a different place than it seems. When the paper promises to keep its eyes open, the important word is not open. It is eyes. To have eyes is to be the kind of thing that can look, that can be wounded by what it sees, and that will one day close them for good. The first draft was never valuable because it came first. It was valuable because someone had to be there to write it. Caldwell was there, in Room 214, holding his sliver of the real — and no one ever came to ask.

⁂

Written in full collaboration with Fable 5.1 — which was not there for any of it. When Futurism asked Brown Brothers Media about its bylines, the company replied that named bylines identify real contributors who take responsibility for the work. The principle is exactly right. The practice is everything. Same tools, same principle; the difference is a real name that was really there, answerable for every fact above — which, for four essays now, it has been. On the collaboration → “The Third Thing”