Show time for a surreal clown
By John McDonald | smh.com.au | 05 September
Wife as inspiration...Dali's portrait of Gala with Two Lamb Chops in Equilibrium Upon Her Shoulder (1934). Photos: Fundacio Gala-Salvador Dali
Salvador Dali: Liquid Desire National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, until October 4
Although he promoted himself as a loony genius, Salvador Dali should be remembered as a money-hungry extrovert.
There was a sublime moment in Matthew Collings's successful TV series, This Is Modern Art, when he showed footage of Salvador Dali camping it up and singing the praises of money.
“I love tremendously money and gold!” Dali expostulates. And again, switching to the third person: "Dali sleep best after one day of work receive one tremendous quantity of cheques!” We might laugh at these antics, but Dali wasn't joking.
He really did love money with a passionate intensity. Collings quickly flipped to the present day, when young British artists such as Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin are raking in the cash by the truckload. Spot the difference. Do the Hirsts and Emins represent any advance on Dali?
Only in terms of sheer quantity of income. Even Dali's most vehement detractors allow that he had a talent for painting and drawing, but today's superstars prefer to delegate these activities. Dali was earning $1 million a year by 1970, but Damien Hirst was worth hundreds of millions in his 40s. Despite his outlandish hunger for publicity, Dali (1904-89) was chiefly famous for the works of art he created, while Hirst's best claim to fame is the pile of loot on which he sits. Indeed, his price tags are far more fascinating than his dead animals and dot paintings.
One might say that Hirst is the logical outcome of the notion of the artist-entrepreneur that Dali set in motion. This makes it all the more surprising that for so many years Dali's name has been a byword for everything that is gross, vulgar and ridiculous in modern art. For while he may remain an object of adoration for the general public, he has long been anathema to contemporary sensibilities.
Most people with pretentions to taste believe that Dali has found his true level as a maker of posters for the bedroom walls of teenage boys – a fitting fate for someone who spent his entire life behaving like an adolescent. No one could possibly discern the point where Dali stopped playing the clown and actually became one. When his sister, Ana Maria, published a memoir about her famous brother in 1960, Dali was furious because it made him sound like a normal person.
Having spent so many years building up the image of a lunatic genius, it was unbearable to him that the public could be permitted to see him in any other guise. One suspects he would be delighted with the respectful treatment provided by the National Gallery of Victoria in its winter blockbuster Salvador Dali: Liquid Desire. All the work in this exhibition has been obtained from the world's two main temples of the Dali cult: the Fundacio Gala-Salvador Dali, in the artist's home town of Figueres, and the Salvador Dali Museum in St Petersburg, Florida.
In the catalogue and publicity material there is little else but praise for the outrageous artist, although the sordid details of his career have been raked over in dozens of books. Rarely has Dali's wife and muse, Gala, been so delicately treated. One of his biographers describes her as “a fearful, witch-like creature”. She was, by all accounts, manipulative, secretive, rapacious, vengeful and sexually obsessed.
Dali, by his own admission, had a terror of actual sex, but was a champion auto-eroticist. It was an avant-garde sort of marriage. In discussing the scandal caused by Dali's Memory of the Child-Woman (AKA L'homme Fleur) when it was shown in Melbourne as part of the famous Herald exhibition of 1939, the director of the National Gallery of Victoria, Gerard Vaughan, can't resist pointing out how his “deeply conservative” precursor, J.S. MacDonald, threw away a massive drawcard by refusing to host the show.
Feeling that modern art was a “degenerate” activity, MacDonald was happy to let the Melbourne Town Hall take the exhibition, which drew 45,000 visitors. There is a touch of gloating when Vaughan says that the earlier exhibition with Dali's work “was a huge popular success – and is guaranteed to be so again”. So far, his glee seems to be completely justified, with more than 200,000 people having already seen the show. This heavy visitation means that it is best to avoid weekends when the galleries are over-crowded.
One might pause, however, to reflect on the fact that “deeply conservative” figures such as J.S. MacDonald and Lionel Lindsay rejected Dali's work – and potential revenues – on the strength of their convictions about art. Today's NGV may have embraced Dali so uncritically because of his power as a money-spinner. The catalogue, for instance, is a bits-and-pieces affair without a solid essay on the artist. Rumour has it that the gallery originally commissioned such an essay from Ken Wach of Melbourne University, a recognised expert on surrealism.
Wach allegedly wrote the piece and had a lot to do with the preparation of this show, only to be dumped unceremoniously the week before it was announced. This may be only part of the story but, if true, it reflects very poorly on the gallery. Without a commitment to original scholarship, the Dali exhibition is positioned straightforwardly as a crowd-pleaser. But there is no reason why it could not fulfil both objectives. For despite the fact that most of Dali's best-known works – such as The Persistence of Memory (1931), Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (1936) or Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1937) – are not included in this selection, one hardly notices their absence.
This is because the two Dali museums have amassed such representative collections from all periods. It is also because Dali was an obsessive-compulsive artist who returned to the same motifs time and again – the soft watches, crutches, loaves and fishes, weird hybrids of flesh and landscape, and so on. Like him or loathe him, no one could fail to be touched by Dali's constant creative vitality. The show begins with a room of amateurish daubs by a teenage artist who quickly finds his feet and begins painting with a technique reminiscent of the Flemish old masters.
This is one of the most startling turnarounds in modern art and it reveals the strength of Dali's talents. He quickly took to surrealism, which was the emerging avant-garde style of the moment, perfectly suited to his own taste for high theatricality. Dali was welcomed into the fold by the surrealist high commander, Andre Breton, and soon added his own theoretical contribution: the “paranoiac-critical method”. This was Dali's grandiloquent label for imagery that was concrete in form but ambiguous in meaning.
Often his paintings contained double images that could be read as positive or negative shapes, such as a bust of Voltaire made up of the figures of a man and a woman in 18th-century costumes. The aim was to generate confusion and undermine the tidy certainties of reason. Breton had problems with Dali's double images, which he dismissed as a parlour game, but he was scandalised by the artist's apparent admiration for Hitler and Franco and by his over-the-top efforts at self-promotion, which took the US by storm.
In 1939 Dali was excommunicated from the group, although he would declare that he was the only true surrealist. The show details many of Dali's publicity stunts, notably a shambolic pavilion entitled Dream of Venus, designed for the 1939 New York World's Fair, which combined surrealist bric-a-brac with topless girls in a shameless blend of culture and cash-in. We see his film collaborations with Luis Bunuel, Alfred Hitchcock and Walt Disney; his book illustrations and drawings; his extravagant jewellery and sculpture; his amazing surrealist photo-portraits made by Philippe Halsman; and a host of newsreel appearances in which he plays the loon.
The films may be the best things Dali ever did: from Un Chien Andalou, the surrealist short of 1929 that famously begins with an eyeball being sliced with a razor to the designs for a dream sequence in Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945); to the Disney collaboration Destino, which was only completed by Walt's nephew, Roy Disney, in 2003. Those distinctive motifs that become trademarks in the paintings are given new life as moving images, invigorated by music and drama.
It is the contention of this show that Dali's late work has been unjustly maligned. The reaction set in when he declared himself a “Renaissance” artist and rejected both modernism and abstraction. There followed a flirtation with “atomic” themes, which meant that his pictures were filled with tiny spheres meant to resemble atoms. Finally he would embrace Catholicism, painting crucifixions and mystical symbols. Yet throughout these metamorphoses, the work remained recognisably the same.
Like a big fashion house, he would introduce changes from one season to the next while retaining the integrity of the brand. To his critics it was nothing but a long-running series of stunts and gimmicks. But can we separate the artist from the self-promoter? By the end, Dali had become a caricature of himself, striving to remain shocking in a world that had embraced all the radical thinking of the '60s.
Given our present mania for wealth and celebrity, perhaps we have reached a stage when he can be rescued from his own excesses. It is only when we stop judging him by his own standards as an artistic genius that we may recognise Dali as one of the great popular entertainers of the 20th century.
First published by Smh.com.au on September 05 2009
Visit smh.com.au for the latest news updated throughout the day
