A Survey of Salvador Dalí in His Surrealist Prime

The title of a new exhibition at Di Donna Galleries, “Dalí: The Great Years, 1929-1939,” begs the question: Just how non-great was the rest of the life and career of Salvador Dalí? According to Di Donna’s lights, an iconographic work like MOMA’s “The Persistence of Memory” (1931) is guaranteed fresh, as is what is likely Dalí’s finest picture, “Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War)” (1936), now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. But the mustachioed Spaniard died in 1989, at the age of 84, half a century after the gallery’s new exhibition ends, illustrating the peculiarities of reputation. That’s a long walk from greatness.The decade in question was, according to the gallery’s press release, “transformative.” Surrealism’s majordomo, André Breton, invited Dalí to join the group in 1929 on the strength of both his paintings and a collaboration of the same year with Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel, “Un Chien Andalou.” The relationship was ill-fated: Breton was controlling and dogmatic; Dali, fascist-friendly and eager to make a buck. Breton, the so-called Pope of Surrealism, had no compunction in ultimately excommunicating (find the anagram) “Avida Dollars.”It was during this decade that Dalí developed a signature manner of working, the so-called paranoiac-critical method. What did this entail? Dalí would, apparently, sit down and drive himself into a tizzy of paranoia. An array of hallucinogenic images would subsequently present itself, thereby bypassing the stipulations of the conscious mind. This approach bears some similarity with automatism, a way of making images and associations free of premeditation.Salvador Dalí pictured in 1939. Wikimedia CommonsThe irony is that Dalí was the most premeditated of paint-handlers, a meticulous craftsman who revered the 17th-century Dutch artist, Johannes Vermeer. Persnicketiness as much as surrealistic caprice, was the rule. Not for nothing did Sigmund Freud, upon meeting Dalí in 1938, question the legitimacy of his vision: “In classic paintings I look for the unconscious, but in your paintings I look for the conscious.” Though Freud later reconsidered his opinion about the artist with the “fanatical eyes,” Dalí was irked. Borrowing pieces from private and public collections, Di Donna seeks to poke a contemporary audience and, with that, an art market for whom familiarity may have bred complacency. “The Great Years” begins with a video monitor playing “Un Chien Andalou” — I didn’t stick around to watch the infamous eyeball slicing — and includes documentary items, including a copy of the December 14, 1936 issue of Time on which Dalí served as cover boy, and a 1930 photo of the Surrealists when the honeymoon between Breton and Dalí had not yet soured.Though Di Donna is eager to prove that Dalí the artist operated with the “sole purpose of furthering the human imagination,” the gallery doesn’t shy away from Dalí the showman and entrepreneur. Mention is made of his affiliation with name brands like Chanel, Schiaparelli and Marx. No, not Karl: Harpo. Among the items on display is a drawing of the comedian seated at his harp. Would that the surrounding giraffes, each of which is in flames, were absent. The delicacy of Dalí’s gossamer line is magical enough without the Surrealist jiggery-pokery.The same thought is prompted by “Spectre du sur la plage” (1935), a desert landscape whose silky rendering of light would generate its own kind of otherworldly portent without the enigmatic doodads dotting the vista. But Dalí’ wouldn’t be Dalí without that frisson and, in the case of the show-stopping “La Profanation de l’hostie” (1930), surplus of putrefaction. Icky things predominate, all of which have been rendered with a jeweler’s attention to detail and a taxidermist’s approximation of life.“The Great Years, 1929-1939” is a museum quality exhibition dedicated to a singularly flamboyant talent.

A Survey of Salvador Dalí in His Surrealist Prime

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