Giorgio de Chirico is not unlike a rock star in terms of his career trajectory. His greatest and most seminal work was done when he was young — between the ages of 23 and 32 — after which he lost much of his "edge," but kept going by rehashing his earlier career, mixing it with the less adventurous but still interesting output of his later years.

This presents interesting challenges for a retrospective of the artist's work. But the curators of "Giorgio de Chirico: De la Metafisica a la Neo Metafisica," an exhibition at the Shiodome Museum, seem to have coped ably.

Sourced from the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the main focus of the show — as indicated by its title — is on his early "metaphysical" paintings and versions of them he did later in life. The exhibition includes a few of the original works, including one of the best known, "Hermetic Melancholy" (1919), as well as dozens of later copies, his so-called neo-metaphysical works.