{"id":4212,"date":"2014-04-29T20:53:54","date_gmt":"2014-04-30T00:53:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/greynotgrey.com\/blog\/?p=4212"},"modified":"2024-07-17T13:18:23","modified_gmt":"2024-07-17T17:18:23","slug":"the-redemption-of-salvador-dali","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/greynotgrey.com\/blog\/2014\/04\/29\/the-redemption-of-salvador-dali\/","title":{"rendered":"The Redemption of Salvador Dali"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of my personal favourite artists is Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dal\u00ed i Dom\u00e8nech, 1st Marqu\u00e9s de Dal\u00ed de Pubol (May 11, 1904 \u2013 January 23, 1989), more commonly known as Salvador Dal\u00ed<\/a>. Or even more often, as Salvador Dali – without the diacritic mark on the \u201ci\u201d.<\/p>\n

\"Salvador

Salvador Dal\u00ed 1939, photo by Carl van Vechten<\/p><\/div>\n

Dali has been largely misunderstood by the critical community until fairly recently, even though he enjoyed mass popularity all along, which is kind of telling. It\u2019s worth noting that he was critically popular before, and then critically unpopular, and then critically popular again and soforth, it kind of comes and goes in waves.<\/p>\n

\"The

The Persistence of Memory, 1931<\/p><\/div>\n

As the author J.G. Ballard, an avid collector of surrealist paintings once noted, \u201cThe critical establishment absolutely disdained Surrealists, and World War II seemed to confirm their hostility.\u201d [Art Newspaper, 1999] J.G. Ballard Quotes<\/a> p. 287<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve seen that disdain. When I was in art school, my instructors cautioned me against enjoying Dali\u2019s work, and that of most of the surrealists in general. Sure, his work is technically<\/i> good, they would say, \u00a0but it\u2019s too easy<\/i>. We heard that in art school a lot about the work of various artists; too \u201ceasy\u201d basically meant not challenging enough, something that could be enjoyed without thinking about it too much, basically implying that anything you could just \u201cenjoy\u201d was decorative work with no real \u201cartistic\u201d value. Now, I personally think that\u2019s a load of crap, but it goes a long way to explaining why fine art has so vigorously turned its back on figurative realist painting – but I digress.<\/p>\n

Back to Dali, even those critics who can \u201cforgive\u201d that his work is easy to enjoy like to dig into Dali’s\u00a0public persona with the intent of explaining away the effect of his art by dissecting his bizarre proclamations and even more bizarre lifestyle, attributing his work to oddities of neurosis and fascist dreamings. I believe that Dali at his prime was never serious, but always sincere.<\/p>\n

What counts as his prime is a matter of some debate, though – there are many that insist that Dali never created work of any significance after he was kicked out of the surrealists, and that he wasted much of his genius in self-promotional antics, devolving into self-parody.<\/p>\n

When Dawn Ades of England\u2019s University of Essex, a leading Dal\u00ed scholar, began specializing in his work 30 years ago, her colleagues were aghast. \u201cThey thought I was wasting my time,\u201d she says. \u201cHe had a reputation that was hard to salvage. I have had to work very hard to make it clear how serious he really was.\u201d
\nSmithsonian Magazine<\/a> – Stanley Meiser – \u00a0April, 2005<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I believe quite the opposite of all the negative sentiments; Dali was a true genius, I believe that he was the first real pop artist, bridging early modernism and postmodernism, and I also believe that his antics were a form of self promotion that are not entirely unlike what we now expect from every artist in the age of celebrity from fine artists like Jeff Koons to street artists like Banksy. Basically, Dali was an icebreaker churning up the seas of modernism in a way that can only really make sense to viewers and art lovers in the post-modern phase of painting.<\/p>\n

\"The

The Temption of St. Anthony, 1946<\/p><\/div>\n

\u00a0People have tended to dismiss the late work as a whole, all 40 years of it,\u201d says Dawn Ades, a leading Dal\u00ed specialist and cocurator of the Dal\u00ed retrospective opening on the 16th of this month at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (through May 15). \u201cBut when you look more closely, you see that Dal\u00ed is in fact a sort of cusp between modernism and Pop art. It becomes a much more interesting problem, and much trickier.
\nThe Great Late Salvador Dal\u00ed<\/a> – \u00a0George Stolz January 2, 2005<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now, it is worth knowing that according to Modernist art critics, Salvador Dali \u2018s prime ended in 1939. That was when he was kicked out of the Surrealists headed by Andr\u00e9 Breton, and left Paris for New York. Br\u00e9ton was a very active socialist and envisioned surrealism as a kind of revolutionary art form something along the model of Leon Trotsky\u2019s notion of art as a revolutionary practice<\/a>. That Dali refused to disavow the rise of fascism in Spain under Franco was too much for Br\u00e9ton, who already disliked Dali\u2019s desire to actually make money from his art to the extent that Br\u00e9ton renamed \u201cSalvador Dali\u201d as \u201cAvida Dollars\u201d. It was a pretty serious diss, but Dali never made a secret of wanting to get rich making art. He also enjoyed the attention of being shocking, which goes a long way to explaining his open support for fascism – especially considering that in his youth he was a communist, at a time when being a communist could get you thrown in jail, which it briefly did, for two months, though the prison records have disappeared.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Was any painter a worse embarrassment than Salvador Dali? Not even Andy Warhol. Long before his physical death in 1989, old Avida Dollars — Andre Breton’s anagram of his name — had collapsed into wretched exhibitionism. Genius, Shocker, Lip-Topiarist: though he once turned down an American businessman’s proposal to open a string of what would be called Dalicatessens, there was little else he refused to endorse, from chocolates to perfumes. He was surrounded by fakes and crooks and married to one of the greediest harpies in Europe: Gala, who made him the indentured servant of his lost talent even \/ as he treated her as his muse.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, Dali was an important artist for about 10 years, starting in the late 1920s. Nothing can take that away from him. Other Surrealists — especially Max Ernst and Dali’s fellow Catalan Joan Miro — were greater magicians; but Dali’s sharp, glaring, enameled visions of death, sexual failure and deliquescence, of displaced religious mania and creepy organic delight, left an ineradicable mark on our century when it, and he, were young. Dali turned “retrograde” technique — the kind of dazzlingly detailed illusionism that made irreality concrete, as in The First Days of Spring, 1929 — toward subversive ends. His soft watches will never cease to tick, not as long as the world has adolescent dandies and boy rebels in it.
\nART: Salvador Dali: Baby Dali<\/a> Robert Hughes, July 04, 1994<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So that\u2019s the respected art critic Robert Hughes – contrast that with this statement from Dali some 30 years after his \u201cprime\u201d:<\/p>\n

\u00a0It is not necessary for the public to know whether I am joking or whether I am serious, just as it is not necessary for me to know it myself.
\nDiary of a Genius<\/a> (1964), p. 12<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I think it\u2019s pretty clear that Dali was well aware of both his clownish reputation and its relationship to his intent as an artist. That said, in recent years Dali\u2019s entire career has been enjoying a redemption in critical circles.<\/p>\n

\u00a0For years art critics wrestling with this problem were forced to carve up his 70-year career into the “good” Surrealist years and the embarrassing “bad” decades (…) a landmark exhibit at Paris’ Pompidou Center (\u2026) aims to rewrite the art history books. It shows how his mass-media period, shunned by critics, was in fact extremely influential and must be reconciled with his early work to fully understand the scope of his genius.<\/p>\n

“The surrealists said that we shouldn’t like his ‘bad’ years… But we can no longer ignore their influence on art in the 50s, 60s and 70s,” said curator Jean-Michel Bouhours.
\n(…)
\n“We are not babies,” said contemporary artist Orlan, who viewed some of Dali’s later work for the first time at a preview of the exhibit. “We must see Dali warts-and-all for ourselves, and make up our own minds independently. Yes he was a show-off, but so are many artists. Why have we censored him?”<\/p>\n

‘Good’ and ‘Bad’ Salvador Dali Finally Meet – Thomas Adamson – Nov. 20, 2012<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Personally, I prefer Dali\u2019s later work, especially his atomic period. While the virtuosity in his early work like \u201cthe Persistence of Memory\u201d (1931) is undeniable, there is a depth and complexity to work like \u201cPortrait of my Dead Brother\u201d (1963) that Dali\u2019s early work only foreshadows.<\/p>\n

\"Portrait

Portrait of my Dead Brother, 1963<\/p><\/div>\n

As Dali himself said in 1960,”Compared to Velazquez I am nothing, but compared to contemporary painters, I am the biggest genius of modern times … but modesty is not my specialty.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Dali's

Dali’s Mustache – photo by Philip Halsman, 1954<\/p><\/div>\n

Fun art fact: if you watch the TV show “Archer” you know the pet ocelot, Babou. Salvador Dali actually did have a pet ocelot. Its name was Babou.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Salvador

Salvador Dali with his pet ocelot, “Babou”<\/p><\/div>\n

If you would like to learn more about Dali\u2019s work throughout his lifetime, the book \u201cDali by Dali<\/a>\u201d is an excellent starting point. Dali himself talks about his life, his work, and his intent, giving a lot of insight than a more academic history. Of course the possibility that he\u2019s making most of it up is a strong undercurrent, but that\u2019s all part of Dali\u2019s showmanship. Of course, if you prefer a more academic history, Dawn Ades played a big part is restoring Dali\u2019s reputation, and her book \u201cDali and Surrealism<\/a>\u201d is pretty much definitive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of my personal favourite artists is Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dal\u00ed i Dom\u00e8nech, 1st Marqu\u00e9s de Dal\u00ed de Pubol (May 11, 1904 \u2013 January 23, 1989), more commonly known as Salvador Dal\u00ed. Or even more often, as Salvador Dali…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[130,628,129],"tags":[294,133,902,142,126,127,762,903,132,312],"class_list":["post-4212","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art-history","category-commentary","category-painters","tag-american-artist","tag-art-history-2","tag-catalan-artist","tag-dali","tag-painter","tag-painting","tag-salvador-dali","tag-spanish-artist","tag-surrealism","tag-surrealist"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2JDlZ-15W","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greynotgrey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4212","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greynotgrey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greynotgrey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greynotgrey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greynotgrey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4212"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/greynotgrey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4212\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4780,"href":"https:\/\/greynotgrey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4212\/revisions\/4780"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greynotgrey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4212"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greynotgrey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4212"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greynotgrey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}