Salutary shock
William Packer
Da – the Centenary Retrospective Palazzo Grassi, S. Samuele, Venice, until 16 January, then to The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia
The experience of the critic is one of constant revision, for nothing remains ever quite the same, least of all old opinions. And of all the major figures of 20th
century art, no one forces us to think again, every time, more than Salvador Dail. The centenary of his birth, in Figueres in Catalonia in the north-east of Spain, presents a moment as good as any to rethink yet again. For no painter in modern times has been more a victim, and self-made victim at that, of his own myth. No one, even in these days of conceptual self-examination and self-promotion, ever put himself quite so much at the centre of his art, the artist's life as the work itself, as Dail did. And, of course, in time such antics grow tedious. Immediately engaging, indeed compelling as his work can be to the uncritical mind, with its postFreudian self-indulgence and infinite sexual possibility, we soon grow out of it — or think we do. There can hardly be one of us to whom Dali, at one point in our lives, did not mean all of modern art, and in time could hardly have meant less. To come back to the work itself, seen clearly and seen whole, can come as a salutary shock.
The retrospective exhibition now at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice affords just such a moment. And in taking the seemingly eccentric decision to begin the story with its end, and so work back to the beginning, its curator — Dawn Ades of Essex University and our world authority on Surrealism in its endless ramifications — has grasped the Dali nettle firmly by the hand. For it has always been his later work that has been the more problematical. After all, after the febrile technical brilliance of the 1930s, was not the work from about 1940 until his death in 1989 a sad and increasingly eccentric decline, his insistent particular obsessions relieved only by the occasional reminder of former powers? Did he not go quite mad?
But it is not just a simple reverse chronology that we are given, but one that is also set upon the several particular themes that so preoccupied Dal'', some indeed over his entire career. Just so we follow the threads of those imaginative and creative obsessions back to their beginnings, and, just so, they begin to make surprising sense. For behind the mask, the pose, the performance there suddenly appears to have been an unexpectedly sensible if contrary mind at work.
The bizarre conjunctions, distortions and transformations of his Surrealism — his soft watches, his enflamed giraffes and spindle-legged elephants — we all by now take as read. Yet to follow him through his engagement with Catastrophe Theory, stereoscopic imagery, holograms, Atomic Particle Physics, multiple imagery, concealed images, and images which change with the distance from which they are viewed — all of which he addressed by his Paranoiac-Critical Method' based on his deep reading of Freud — is to find something more than merely intuitive an expression. And as their actual expression, there are the enduring subjects — his wife Gala, now as the Madonna, now as Leda; and The Angelus' of Millet as a universal yet ambiguous iconic image, at once sexual and devotional. Indeed the eternal symbiosis of the sexual and the religious was a lifelong preoccupation.
Yet all the while there is Dail the painter, of that familiar, sharply focused, minutely realised, oddly febrile technique, yet one founded, as the remarkable later rooms full of his early work make clear, in a deep and wonderfully precocious knowledge, in particular of his native Spanish School — from Zurbaran and Velazquez to Miro and Picasso. Yet as enthralling as that earlier and formative work is, it was — for me, unexpectedly — a couple of large still-lifes from the later 1930s that brought me up short, and most especially the darker canvas of the two, 'Imperial Violets' of 1938, a brooding, sharply lit image of a black telephone handpiece on a plate and three half-eaten sardines, all set on a plain that, with its abrupt shift of scale, stretches away into a far and darkening world. The telephone, we are told, is the telephone of Munich, the mood the despair of approaching disaster. Loose and open in its handling but for the central objects, it is as powerful a work as any he ever made.
Dali said some very sensible things. 'Painter, don't worry about being modern: it is the only thing, unfortunately, no matter what you do, you can't help being.' How very true.
For tickets to the Palazzo Grassi exhibition, telephone (00 39) 042 46 00 451 or www.palazzograssi.it.
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