No. 94: The Ball Game. His admiration for the work of Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) was now of very long standing--and continued unabated. Lately, he had begun a project called "The Modernist Romance" (suggested by Freud's "The Family Romance") for which he selected, isolated and, as far as was possible, duplicated certain details--painterly stage props--from modernist paintings he loved. This week, he was happily plundering de Chirico's "The Song of Love" from 1914, excerpting the green ball and building one for himself. Unable to maintain de Chirico's purity, however, he added white stitching to his, thus making it, pointlessly, into a giant baseball.