Art Review | Salvador Dali: A Brazen Visionary With a Surreal Self
MuckTheDuck
Arts
February 18, 2005
ART REVIEW | SALVADOR DALI
A Brazen Visionary With a Surreal Self
By ROBERTA SMITH
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/18/arts/design/18smit.html?ex=1108875600&en=b7d42e2ed4df9ed1&ei=5070
Philadelphia — The Philadelphia Museum of Art's retrospective of the
work of Salvador Dalí, the megalomaniacal Surrealist painter and every
teenager's favorite artist, is a visual and psychic marathon. It fills
20 galleries, many quite large, with nearly 200 works of art, many
quite small and so stupefyingly detailed that they require close
study. At times, as one gallery follows another, the show begins to
feel like a Surrealist labyrinth. Be prepared to catch a good case of
Dalí delirium.
Dalí's achievement can be hard to grasp. It is all but de rigueur to
say that it has been obscured by his flamboyant temperament and
indefatigable self-promotion, and further trivialized by his pervasive
influence - unequaled even by Picasso - that is not restricted to
just legions of subsequent artists. There are entire genres of
popular culture and kitsch that seem almost unimaginable without Dalí,
including horror movies, science-fiction book covers and cartoons.
The mixture of radical and conservative forces in his art is also
confusing. The Renaissance perspective and jewel-like rendering,
combined with an aggressive sexual polymorphism, has sometimes seemed
reactionary, literary and, well, sick. That is less the case these
days, however, when artists recycle dead styles with aplomb, narrative
and form are not seen as mutually exclusive and sexuality is no longer
considered an either/or proposition.
Dalí, who was born in 1904 in Figueres, a Catalonian town near the
French border in Spain, is a hardcore excavator of the self. De
Chirico may have been the founding painter of Surrealism and an
indispensable inspiration to Dalí, as were Miró, Tanguy and Picasso,
to name but a few. But de Chirico's haunting scenes of deserted plazas
and arcades are, relatively speaking, as benign as bedtime stories.
Dalí's paintings from the late 1920's and early 30's are among the
most memorably, lusciously harrowing images of Surrealism.
His serene yet nightmarish combinations of pristine planes and sudden
eruptions of deformed bodies and tortured flesh are famously fraught
with sexual anxiety and obsessions: onanism, scatology and fear of
impotence. They affirm most explicitly Surrealism's first article of
faith: that the uncontrollable forces of the unconscious discovered by
Freud were the true governors of reality.
It is always amazing to see, as this exhibition once more
demonstrates, the extent to which Dalí absorbed Surrealism's tenets
while still in Spain, reading Freud word for word, devouring special
magazines and catalogs from Paris and also studying firsthand the work
of the original Surrealist, Hieronymus Bosch, which he saw at the
Prado while studying art in Madrid.
By the time he got to Paris, for a brief visit with his mother and
sister in 1926, he was like a powder keg in search of a match. "Little
Cinders," executed in 1927 and 1928, is a fabulous lexicon of sexual
references, painting and drawing techniques and avant-garde styles
overseen by a blimplike torso of uncertain sexuality. A painting that
Dalí kept with him until his death in 1989, it juxtaposes a
self-portrait with a head of his close friend, the poet Federico
García Lorca. "Accommodations of Desire," completed after his second
sojourn in Paris, fleshes out this fraught vision with an astounding
Renaissance verisimilitude. Set on the stage of a barren desert
landscape, white pebbles in a series are plastered with variations on
an image of a lion's head that invoke both frightening parental
authority and female sexuality.
It has long been held in the art world that this explosion of talent
didn't last long and that by the late 1930's, when Dalí was still a
young man, his best years were behind him and his feckless nature was
in ascendance. In the years after World War II, many friends and
colleagues were put off by his energetic embrace of the Roman Catholic
faith (he had been raised as an atheist), which resulted in the
brittle, levitating Hollywood-style images of crucifixes on view at
the close of this exhibition. (He called this phase of his art
"nuclear mysticism.")
Even worse for his reputation was his eventual support of Franco's
Spain, seen as an infuriating betrayal from the creator of "Soft
Construction With Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War)" of 1936.
That work, with its self-devouring rhomboid monster inspired by Goya's
Saturn, may supersede Picasso's "Guernica" as the signal antiwar
painting of the 20th century.
And there were sundry misdemeanors against his own work: it is said
that toward the end of his life, he signed thousands of sheets of
blank paper, guaranteeing the world a steady stream of fake,
factory-made Dalí lithographs.
Since Dalí's death, the importance of his early work has been
reaffirmed by the sparkling show that came from the Hayward Gallery in
London to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1994. In 2000, the
Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford mounted an examination of Dalí's use of
optical illusions and double and multiple images; one of those works,
the 1938 "Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach," which harbors
a large dog among its cavelike formations, is exhibited here as well.
Both exhibitions were orchestrated, as was this one, by the veteran
Dalí scholar Dawn Ades. She was assisted on this show by Montse Aguer
and collaborated on its Philadelphia version with Michael R. Taylor,
the museum's curator of modern art.
The years since Dalí's death have also brought balanced, extensively
researched biographies by Meredith Etherington-Smith and Ian Gibson,
which sort through his often fabulist autobiographical writings and
align his personality traits with his tortured upbringing.
In some ways Dalí was doomed from the start. Named for an older
brother who died at 2, several months before the artist's birth, Dalí
was scarred by the idea that he was a poor substitute, yet also
spoiled by parents fearful that he, too, might die. He was
pathologically shy, which he learned to disguise with tantrums and
outrageous behavior. He remained a fearful, sexually ambivalent man.
He was dominated first by his intimidating father (who seems to have
always referred to his son as "the boy") and then by Gala Dalí, his
wife, muse and business manager.
He was also essentially apolitical; his acceptance of Franco reflected
most of all his deep-seated need to be in Spain. The flat, barren
landscapes in Dalí's paintings replicate the Empurdan plain around
Figueres. The haunting, melting profile head of the "Great
Masturbator," which is a precursor of the famous melted watches and a
recurring image throughout his work, was based on a stone that Dalí
found on the beach near Cadaqués, the coastal town not far from
Figueres where he and Gala lived half of each year from 1948 on.
This exhibition originated at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice last
summer. It proceeds on the premise that all of Dalí, like all of
Picasso, deserves attention. It moves relentlessly across about 65
years of paintings and drawings, sculpture and set designs, beginning
with a small Post-Impressionist nocturne of the harbor at Cadaqués
painted in 1918, when he was 14, and concluding with his last canvas,
"The Swallow's Tail," a delicate trompe-l'oeil work done in 1983.
The exhibition includes a couch in the form of Mae West's lips; two
of Dalí's famous, kitschy lobster telephones; and a monitor playing
the dream sequence he designed for Alfred Hitchock's "Spellbound." In
the museum's video gallery, the film "Un Chien Andalou," Dalí's famous
collaboration with Luis Buñuel, alternates with "Destino," a charming
six-minute animated film that he and Walt Disney worked on in 1948 but
that was not completed until 2003, long after both men were dead.
The circus of the artist's life is played down. The show presents
almost nothing in the way of ephemera: exhibition catalogs, book
illustrations, the many magazines to which Dalí, a tireless and often
eloquent essayist and poet, contributed. There are only a few
photographs of the famously photographed artist.
This arrangement encourages almost total immersion in his imagery and
suggests that Dalí did both weak and wonderful paintings throughout
much of his life. From 1931, for example, there is the fascinatingly
bad "William Tell," whose legend Dalí, imposing a method he called
critical paranoia, reinterpreted as a castration drama, with its
comically monstrous, knife-wielding father.
The show is sustained by Dalí's virtuosity and by his abilities as
what might be called a high-concept painter, as well as by his
involvement with that modernist taboo, spatial illusionism. Dalí did
not simply resurrect Renaissance perspective. He used it as it had
never quite been used before, to delineate an immense emptiness that
was both terrifying and seductive, infinite and exact.
But the exhibition's most interesting lesson, from an artist whose
images adapt so well to reproduction and are so often criticized as
being illustrational, is how physical, and physically different, his
paintings are. From the beginning of his career to the end, this
consummate master of trompe l'oeil illusion never stopped
experimenting with the physical properties of his art, frequently
foretelling important developments elsewhere.
A small, furious ink drawing from 1926 could easily have been made by
Jackson Pollock 15 years later. From the late 1930's onward Dalí's
paintings present indications of the dry, brushy surfaces of Color
Field painting; the precision of Photo Realism; and the layered,
levitating forms of Neo-Expressionism. These qualities virtually
collide in the hallucinatory "Railway Station at Perpignan" of 1965,
in one of the final galleries.
It shares this space with two other exceptional paintings: "Portrait
of My Dead Brother" (1963) and "The Sistine Madonna" (1958), which is
owned by the Metropolitan. Their Ben-day-dotted surfaces and ghostly
images, so prescient of the work of the highly regarded German artist
Sigmar Polke, could easily have been made yesterday. For better and
for worse, Dalí is more than ever an artist of our time.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company