It’s usually too soon to write off what might seem, at first glance, a great artist’s less compelling work, as these small paintings would make abundantly clear if nothing else did. For more than a hundred years, Giorgio de Chirico has been revered for the so-called metaphysical paintings he made before, during, and right after the first World War. Then, in 1919 according to John Ashbery, de Chirico’s painterly genius “evaporated”…