Dali reframed
A huge retrospective of Salvador Dali's work sheds new light on his artistic wanderlust and creative prescience, moving from one style to another in a long career.
By LENNIE BENNETT
Published February 21, 2005
PHILADELPHIA - Standing in line at the press preview of the big Salvador Dali show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, I chatted with the woman in front of me. She said she was a food writer but wanted to see this exhibition "by the greatest artist of the 20th century."
Behind me, a man commented dryly, "Well, not quite."
I smiled and said, "Picasso."
"Exactly," he said. "Among others."
"Oh, right," said the woman. "Of course."
Therein lies the conundrum that has dogged Dali for the better part of a century. He has always been compared with a formidable peer group, artists who mostly stayed the course, shoring up the arc of modern art through postimpressionism, abstract expressionism and into pop art. But Dali, during his long life, was always auditioning for a new part.
This striving becomes clear in the huge retrospective, which originated in Venice in 2004 and ends in Philadelphia on May 15. It was curated by Dawn Ades, Michael Taylor and Montse Aguer.
The insight into Dali's artistic restlessness isn't a new one, particularly for those of us who know the career-spanning collection at the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg.
Critics over the years have dismissed Dali, saying his best work was behind him by the 1930s, when he was still a young man and beginning to drift from the surrealist canon that made him famous. After that, they believe, he mined old themes and sank into self-indulgent, overwrought paintings meant to grandstand his finesse as a painter rather than break new ground. His embrace of popular culture didn't help; he dabbled in advertising, endorsing products from cars to hosiery if the price was right.
For some who cling to the glorious age of modernism, the Philadelphia retrospective will validate those beliefs. For those more open-minded, it proves Dali's prescience, his ability to ride on the cusp of new ideas and interpret them as art.
Organized to celebrate the centennial of his birth in 1904, "Salvador Dali" is the first major retrospective of his work since his death in 1989 and the first in the United States in more than 60 years. That's a long time to wait for a reappraisal of one of the world's most popular artists. Though the St. Petersburg Dali Museum lent generously to it, the show won't come here; with 200 works, including 150 paintings, it's too big. Besides, we were fortunate to have the other centennial exhibition, "Dali and Mass Culture," which recently closed. Taken together, they give us the most complete look at Dali's contribution to 20th century art.
One of the problems with Dali is that, unlike Picasso, his growth was wildly unlinear. In 1926, when he was a mere 22, he painted the exquisite Basket of Bread, a radiant homage to 17th century chiaroscuro. That same year, he produced larger paintings of women referencing both Picasso's recently abandoned cubist period and the new classicism Picasso had embraced. Even then, Dali was racing through styles voraciously, at the same time looking backward and forward.
Though the exhibition is chronological, it opens with a small gallery containing the midcareer painting Impressions of Africa, which reinforces this back-and-forth both stylistically and thematically. It was completed in 1938 while Dali and his wife, Gala, were moving around Europe, kept from their home in Spain because of the civil war. A stretch of desert, reminiscent of the coastal beaches of his home that he painted through his life, is sensual and luminous. Dali himself is in the foreground at his easel, a nod to Velazquez's Las Meninas. His hand reaches toward us, mysteriously lit and dramatically foreshortened. The double images that made him famous are sprinkled through the background, as are some of his recurring symbols: a matador, a donkey, ruined buildings and, of course, Gala.
From that painting we switch back to the beginning, 1919, when the precocious teenager was painting portraits emulating Goya, Raphael, the impressionists and the fauvists. His family sent him to a prestigious academy in Madrid to study, where he met leaders of the avant-garde such as Picasso; Luis Bunuel, who would become his collaborator on the influential film Un Chien Andalou; and the poet Federico Garcia Lorca, with whom he would have an intense personal relationship for several years.
He had two one-man shows in 1925 and 1926 in a Barcelona gallery. Dali painted obsessively preparing for them, producing remarkable portraits of family and friends. His sister Ana Maria was a favorite subject, and Figure at a Window shows her with her back to us, gazing out a window at the Cadaques port. It's dreamy and evocative, with the flutter of curtains, soft folds of her dress and finely modeled curls. We get lost, with her, in the beautiful summer day, with a breeze that ripples the water beneath a soft blue sky. As representational as it is, we can see in his interest in surface treatments and the geometry of the composition his knowledge of abstraction even as he recalls 19th century German romantic painters.
His connection with the surrealists, friendship with Lorca and interest in psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud unleashed his creativity during the late 1920s, resulting in an extraordinary body of work we think of as "classic" Dali. The Persistence of Memory isn't here as it was in the Venice show (its owner, the Museum of Modern Art, probably wanted it back for its grand reopening in fall 2004), but another masterpiece, Accommodations of Desire, is. And what a narrative of repressed fantasies it is! Like other works of its ilk, it's small, jewel-like, painted on board rather than canvas to give it a renaissance sheen. Seven boulders sit on a barren plain, some bearing images of a lion, the symbol Dali used for his intimidating father. A disembodied female is painted on one boulder, her genitals a maw in which the lion strides. Scattered on the plain are other figures, including a likeness of his father, who feeds another lion while an emaciated nude embraces him. On another boulder, Dali has painted swarms of ants, a recurring symbol of death and decay.
At this point, Dali let every morbid thought, latent sexual anxiety and unresolved emotional issue hang out. His paintings drag us into his febrile imagination. In William Tell, one of the most disturbing works in the show, Dali turns the heroic tale of the 14th century Swiss patriot into an Oedipal castration nightmare. That and The Enigma of Desire deal with his ambivalent feelings toward his parents. William Tell is a tortuous slam at his father; Enigma is more, well, enigmatic about his mother. Dali uses as the central image the porous rocks that litter the Catalan coast. An elegantly rendered, huge one is imprinted over and over with the words "ma mere." Dali's mother had died in 1921, and this part of the painting reads like a keening refrain. The base of the rock resolves into one of Dali's soft self-portraits, mouthless and eyes closed. It's more than a mournful tribute to his mother - how to explain the grotesque figures that also inhabit the canvas, and the fierce animal head, perhaps a beardless lion, sprouting from the mother rock?
But Dali could be clever and amusing, too, as seen in the surrealist objects he put together, assemblages of ephemera that together become elaborate exercises in fetishism.
By this time, estranged from his family for what they considered offensive art, he had thrown his lot in with Gala Eluard. She became his wife, cook, protector, business negotiator and, perhaps most important, his muse. With her, he created a hermetic mythology that would reappear in his paintings for the rest of his life. Pegasus bursting from ruined columns becomes the cri de coeur of his newly felt freedom.
Part of the exhibition deals with Dali's fascination with Jean-Francois Millet's Angelus, a popular, sentimental 19th century painting of a peasant couple. In Dali's hands, the image of the pious man and woman becomes another castration story, the woman morphing into a praying mantis-type creature threatening to devour the emasculated man. A simple interpretation would be that Dali's ambivalence toward sex and women was heightened by a volatile woman like Gala. He loved her and needed her, and in later paintings, when their relationship settled into a less demanding domesticity, he would venerate her. But she also, in those early years together, threatened him.
Picasso's Guernica has been hailed as the greatest 20th century painting about war. But Dali, too, produced a masterpiece that some critics believe surpasses Picasso's work in its evocation of slaughter and destruction. Soft Construction With Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War) reaches back to Dali's forebear Francisco Goya and his unforgettable vision of Saturn devouring his children. Premonition is a beautiful painting technically, its soft clouds skimming the blue skies recalling Goya's pastorals. But towering over the ravaged landscape is a monstrous head attached to rotting limbs that are tearing themselves apart. It is unforgettable, as those who saw it when it was on loan to the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg a year ago will remember.
Dali, a great admirer of science and technology, increasingly appropriated atomic theory into his work during the last three decades of his career. Added to that was a new interest in religion. He called this later style nuclear mysticism, masterful, utterly fluid and formally composed. In Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubicus), Gala becomes a Madonna, gazing up at a crucified Christ who seems to levitate in front of a cubed cross, the "nails" smaller cubes that float in optical illusion.
Illusion had always interested Dali, but the knowledge that the material world - objects - was no more than juggling jumbles of atoms profoundly influenced his painting. Images had always had a sort of disconnectedness from each other; now they often exploded, or became unbound by gravity.
Dali anticipated the pop and op art movements, using Benday dots years before Roy Lichtenstein, and appropriating images before Andy Warhol. The Sistine Madonna is a huge blowup of a newspaper photograph of Pope John XXIII's ear, with the oversize pattern of halftone dots. He paints in the ear Raphael's Sistine Madonna from the 16th century. On the surface, he includes trompe l'oeil objects - a piece of paper, a cherry suspended on a string projecting a shadow - like "fool-the-eye" still lifes of the 17th century.
"Salvador Dali" makes a persuasive (and by the end you might feel exhausting) argument for the artist's singular genius. All creative people, to some degree, let us into their minds and hearts; his was an original and unique form of generosity.
The unfortunate truth of the exhibition, however, is that it is a bit short on later paintings. Few question Dali's early contributions; the big debate has always been over his later work, which is attracting a new generation of scholars, historians and artists ready to take a fresh look. This show might have provided more ammunition for those wanting to enter that re-evaluation. In fairness, his later period was dominated by large-scale paintings, with fewer than 20 created during the last productive years of his life, well before his death. Their size makes them difficult to transport, and museums are understandably reluctant to loan them.
We do get one, The Railway Station at Perpignan, in which Dali revisits the Angelus theme in a cosmic explosion of light fanning out into the shape of a Maltese Cross, illuminating the artist as he seems to freefall into his fantasies. And The Swallow's Tail of 1983, considered to be his last work, indicates that his hand was failing but his mind was not. It's a meditation on the theories of French mathematician Rene Thom about equilibrium. Knowing that gives some underpinning to the spare lines, one looking like the tail of a bird. The connections don't stop there; Thom used an s-curve in his theorizing, which Dali turned into the decorative carving on a violin and then doubled up to make a curling mustache, a wry way of signing the piece.
Dali once wrote that he did not have faith and would probably die without finding heaven.
Dali had faith only in himself. Like Dante, he was unafraid of walking through the more hellish corners of his mind. Sometimes his grand, deep journey approached a heavenly transcendence, or a mortal variation of it.
Lennie Bennett can be reached at 727 893-8293 or lennie@sptimes.com
Review"Salvador Dali" is at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through May 15. For information, call 215 763-8100 or visit www.philamuseum.org