Dalí

Paris and Madrid

by DAWN ADES

The exhibition Dalí, recently at the Centre Pompidou, Paris (to 25th March), where this reviewer saw it, is now at the Reina Sofía, Madrid (to 25th September). It is not the first show to include, alongside the paintings, the ephemeral, commercial, self-promotional and innovative activities which brought Dalí universal fame in the post-War era, when he was, as he put it himself, the fifth most famous person in the world. The 2004 Palazzo Grassi Centenary exhibition incorporated films and videos, design and fashion products, and other mat­erial such as the Philippe Halsman photographs, while the simultaneous exhi­bition at the Caixa Forum in Barcelona, Dalí. Cultura de Masas (a version of which travelled to the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam, with the quirky title It’s all Dalí: Film, Fashion, Photography, Design, Advertising, Painting) focused on his energetic exploitation of popular culture, from newspapers to fashion. But it is the first to present the cult of the personality of Salvador Dalí without apology and as integral to the exhibition: life and work as one. The films, videos and photographs that recorded some of the earliest examples of performance art (Warhol is well known to have taken note) or which are works in the new media in their own right (Chaos and creation of 1960 is probably the first artist’s video) or which constitute Dalí’s many forays into TV broadcasting, including advertisements (his appearance on BBC TV’s What’s my Line in 1957 is an all-time comic highlight) dominated the latter spaces of the exhibition.

While previous exhibitions have rehabilitated in one way or another Dalí’s later work, this exhibition gives pride of place to his public personae as they were variously constructed, the impresario of banquets and lavish balls, the lecturer who arrived at the Sorbonne in a cauliflower-filled Rolls Royce, protagonist of happenings, including a bullfight in his honour, and so on. There are some fascinating discoveries here, but little attempt to distinguish what could be seen as quite different forms of engagement with new media: video, film, photography, TV and performance. An overall impression of burlesque, with sound variously booming and inaudible from the free-standing hubs with rolling programmes on monitors is certainly entertaining but also distracting.

All this is not, however, at the expense of presenting his lifelong work as a painter. The Pompidou secured superb loans of paintings and drawings, including MoMA’s Persistence of memory (cat. p.137) and the rarely seen Old age of William Tell of 1931 (p.129), but sadly not many of the 1929 paintings apart from The great masturbator (p.121; Fig.62) and the poignant First days of spring (p.118). MoMA’s Illuminated pleasures and the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Accommodations of desire are absent, as is the brilliant and haunting Portrait of Eluard that surfaced briefly from a private collection last year at Sotheby’s, only to disappear again, priced beyond any public collection’s means. The works were hung at the Pompidou in broadly chronological order, quite tightly packed in two large open spaces, the second of which contained most of the films and videos. The hang eschews any dramatic presentation or singling out of star items, giving a curiously flat, undifferentiated effect. There was no privileging of paintings over all Dalí’s other multifarious manifestations. The theatrical was concentrated in a room devoted to Dalí’s work for the stage, and a full-scale installation reprises the Mae West lips room at the Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí in Figueres, with its visual puns. A cheap and simple solution was found for the late stereoscopic paintings. A few pairs of paintings are shown here, but no attempt has been made to devise a way of seeing them in 3-D as intended, although this is possible. For example, different viewing methods were devised at the various venues for the exhibition Dalí’s Optical Illusions (Wadsworth Atheneum; Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, 2000), all cumbersome, but more satisfying than the simulacra offered here, colour reproductions on a small scale installed in mirrored boxes.

Vitrines and cases along the centre of the first space focused on various key themes, such as Dalí’s obsession with Millet’s Angelus in the early 1930s. Millet’s painting itself was lent from the Musée d’Orsay, which is obviously a coup and pleasing but in a sense unnecessary given that Dalí’s familiarity with the image went back to his childhood, when one of its innumerable reproductions hung at his school; it was rather the ubiquity of the image, distributed in postcards and chromo-lithographs all over Catholic Europe, than its physical presence, that underlay his obsession and gave his psychoanalytical interpretation a particularly scandalous character. Over-all the curators have not overloaded the exhibits with explanatory or interpretative texts, nor thematised them. This has been left to the catalogue, which also includes a few unpublished texts by Dalí.1

The previous Dalí exhibition at the Pompidou, held in 1979–80, was curated by Daniel Abadie with the active interest of Dalí himself. Presumably it was the latter’s idea to drape one of the rooms in black cloth that pulsated as though breathing. There are relatively few spectacular interventions in the current exhibition design, which is by Oscar Tusquets, who, for the Palazzo Grassi in 2004, took advantage of Venetian theatrical and mask-making skills and constructed a gigantic three-dimensional version of the 1944 painting Dream caused by the flight of a bee around a pomegranate, one second before awakening in the foyer. Photographs from 1979 of the spectacular assemblage of things, including a Citroën and Meissonnier’s painting of Napoleon lent by the Musée du Louvre, in the vast space of the forum of the Pompidou, are included in an appendix of the cata­-logue, together with Dalí’s letter to Abadie concerning the three scandals of his exhibition (‘Les trois scandales de mon exposition au Centre de mon ami Pompidou’), one of which concerned the strike that closed the Museum on the day of the show’s opening. In the present exhibition the conceit for the installation as a whole is a body; one enters through a small egg-shaped space that refers to Dalí’s self-presentation in many performances and images as emerging from an egg. The final room, which also included a small number of his books and manuscripts, is intended to represent the brain. His writings are thinly presented in the exhibition, mostly gathered in this small room. This is surprising, given that much of the most important material is in French, that he was one of the most articulate, original and prolific writers of the twentieth century and that the Pompidou has a fine track record of making exhibitions about poets and writers.

For this reviewer there were two highlights in the exhibition, one on a small, the other on a grand, scale. The first is – was originally – a pedagogical publication, Auguste Boyer’s Le Français par l’image pour le tout premier engagement au langage oral et écrit of 1933. Dalí altered virtually every page, adding to and manipulating the carefully drawn object-fragments illustrating the systematic lists of words (e.g. ‘Head – Face – Eye (one) – Eyes – Nose – Ear (one)’) to create monstrous sexual fantasies, comic visual puns and hybrid creatures. The organisers have scanned the original and Dalí’s version and present them electronically with the pages turning automatically, a tour de force. The second is the famous late painting Tunny fishing (1966–67; p.303; Fig.61), which was in the Pompidou’s 1979 Dalí exhibition but subsequently has rarely been seen in public. This was one of the few pictures in the show to be given a wall to itself, and it deserves it. The catalogue entry suggests that Dalí treats this subject as a pastiche of the grand genre of history painting, and it could be seen as this, among other things. A shoal of tuna has been driven into a bay and is slaughtered by hand. This was a not infrequent event in the Mediterranean, although Dalí claimed that he learned of it from a reproduction of a painting shown to him by his father. It is a troubling violent painting with its intense colours, the deep blue stained with blood, its mixture of techniques including photo-based imagery and passages of abstraction, figures derived from classical, Neo-classical and Pop sources and the proximity of the dying fish and the naked male bodies. Right in the centre of the picture is a disturbing conjunction: a tuna fish being knifed by a faceless figure next to a young male nude which is very similar to the figure at the centre of the 1960 painting The Trinity, now in the Vatican. Its placing in The Trinity indicates the suffering figure of Christ, and its appearance in Tunny fishing introduces the idea of sacrifice into the massacre of fish. The head of a young man in the foreground who, startlingly, by contrast with the classical bodies, wears a very modern vest, is from a photograph and could be taken as a ‘compen-sation portrait’ of Dalí himself. It is worth noting that the previous year Dalí had painted one of his most ambitious pictures, The railway station at Perpignan (Fig.63; not exhibited) in which he unequivocally identifies with the Son of God.

Dalí and his collaborator Luis Buñuel once challenged each other to see who dared to be most explicit in representing sexual activity. Dalí went on to scandalise first from the left and then from the right, taking on sex, taste, politics and religion. It is interesting that Dalí had one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century as his friend and champion in the post-War years: in a showdown with the Surrealists over Dalí’s painting the Sistine Madonna, which Duchamp had included in the Surrealist exhibition in New York, Surrealist Intrusion in the Enchanters’ Domain, Duchamp defied the Surrealists’ dictat to exclude it.

There is no doubt that post-War Dalí, despite his disastrous political allegiances and apparently reactionary aesthetics, speaks to a new generation of film-makers, poets and artists, especially in his own Catalonia. This became clear in the two-day symposium organised by the Pompidou in January. Rather than the early and the Surrealist Dalís, which hitherto have drawn most serious critical attention and led the reclamation process, it was the late paintings and all the Dalí personages and proclamations, videos and publications, that were the subject of interest for several speakers. Perhaps the appeal is partly to do with Dalí’s resistance to Modernism and absolute lack of respect for the polite and the politically correct, as well as the extraordinary inventiveness admired by André Breton. In the early 1930s, when Dalí was still the bright new hope of the Surrealists, Breton wrote admiringly of his inner ‘boiling’. This ferment continued throughout his life in different contexts and different media: painting, video, film, hologram, sculpture, print, poetry, novel, ballet, opera, autobiography, manifesto, criticism, happenings, photography and so on. The current exhibition is far from exhausting the fascination of his ambiguous, provocative, manifold and still startling production.

1    Catalogue: Dalí. By Jean-Hubert Martin. 383 pp. incl. numerous col. + b. & w. ills. (Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2013), €44.90. ISBN 978–2–8442–66149.