Ovals, spirals, opulent materials, heroic ges tures: what does the modern spirit know of these essential elements of Baroque art? In veterate individualists, we cannot see pomp and grandeur as a way of life; and the idea that human experience should be framed publicly, as it often is in Baroque art, does not match up with our sense that each of us is locked inside his or her own head. The Baroque works today mostiy as a romantic metaphor, as a dream in which our private grandiosity bursts out and takes over the en tire world. Some would say this can never be a modern metaphor. And one may wonder if the later, neo-Baroque work of Jacques Lipchitz and Giorgio de Chirico ought to be called modernist, anti-modernist, or moder nism having a bad dream about itself. These are questions that Baroque forms inevitably raise when they appear in a modern context. What is missing, in the current climate, are considered answers. In December, when Borghi & Company on East Eightieth Street mounted a large, interesting show of the later work of de Chirico, I was distressed to hear people observe affinities between de Chirico’s heavily worked, tragi-comic can vases and the polychrome statuary of Jeff Koons. Are all neo-Baroques equal? I think not. Meanwhile, in the catalogue of the Lip chitz retrospective that’s now at the Jewish Museum,[1]Alan G. Wilkinson, the curator, presents a case for the late, neo-Baroque Lip chitz that involves an artificial distinction