Dali: Centre Georges Pompidou, 18 Decembre 1979-21 Avril 1980

LucaMenes Dom Feb 13, 2011 11:25 pm

Apro questa discussione per poter inserire curiosità, qualunque notizia o foto di questa importantissima esposizione fatta per coronare la brillante carriera di Dalì. In giro si trova molto poco, con l'aiuto di tutti magari possiamo arrivare ad un bel pò di notizie... Speriamo!

LucaMenes Dom Feb 13, 2011 11:57 pm

Dal Time del 03/03/1980:

At Paris' Pompidou Center, a Salvador Dali retrospective

The Salvador Dali retrospective of 436 works from 1920 to the present day, which opened at Paris' Pompidou Center in December and will run until mid-April, is—one need not hold one's breath—a resounding popular success. The number of people who crowd into the show on the Beaubourg's top floor every day is between 8,000 and 12,000, a remarkable turnout for a live artist in a country whose public has never much liked modern art. Only Tut could pack them in like this. Culture votes with its feet, ratifying Dali's insight that in an age of mass communications, it is better to seem than to be: success, in effect, is the triumph of packaging over contents.

Dali's career has been very long. He is now 75, and almost all the works of art that make up his contribution to modernism, and on which his fame as a serious artist rests, were painted before his 35th birthday. In fact they were done in about seven years, from 1929 to 1936. Before, his work is all a pastiche of others. After 1937, it is mostly parody of himself.

In his best years, the Catalan promoter, with his mustache wax and lobster telephones and soft watches, his florid metaphorical chitchat and beady eye for the American jugular, finally managed to annihilate his earlier self—Mad Dog Sal, the insecure and ravenously aggressive young lounge lizard whose tiny, enameled visions helped create one of the extreme moments of dandyist revolt and modernist disgust. But today the only interesting thing about Dali is the obsessive grip of his pose. He has convinced a public that could hardly tell a Vermeer from a Velásquez that he is the spiritual heir to both painters. And he has done so, not through art but by the diffusion of small anecdotes. Everything is calculated, literally down to the last hair: even his mustache is lifted from Velásquez's portraits of Philip IV.

"The difference between a madman and me," Dali is often quoted as saying, "is that I am not mad." Indeed, he is not; and that is why the Pompidou Center is crowded. Dali's public hopes to meet a mind which fulfills its two ruling clichés about artists—the painter as old master (Raphael, Rubens) and the artist as freak (Van Gogh, Rimbaud). Dali gives his public a tacky, vivid caricature of both while fulfilling neither. No modern painter has armored himself more assiduously in mediocrity.

Right from the start, Dali was a glacial opportunist with weak powers of formal invention. He was also precocious and adroit, and so, as one might expect, his early work is an anthology of secondhand manners. He begins as a late-Picasso cubist, turning out bland art deco still lifes that contain a few premonitions of his later imagery; the lank, droopy fish in Moonlit Still Life, 1927, for example, predicts the flaccidity that was to appear in his soft watches and piano lids. But he did not find a style until he came to Paris and met the surrealists.
Nothing could be farther from the truth than the popular idea that Dali "invented" surrealism, and this exhibition shows why. One sees him gobbling up his prototypes from other artists in the surrealist orbit: Tanguy's limp biomorphic shapes, bits from Max Ernst's Histoire Naturelle, sand painting and collage from Picasso and Masson, Miró's swarming bugs and beasts, and, above all, the plunging distances, sharp perspectives, incongruous objects and frozen clarity of Giorgio de Chirico's pre-1918 pittura metafisica.

Every young painter learns by imitation. But when reading the unction that the Paris show catalogue pours on Dali's receptive head—he "incarnates surrealism, definitively and in the most noble way, by assimilating surrealist painting to the aristocratic passage of time"—one should remember that he was not among the founders of surrealism. Yet his role in the movement was very distinctive. Dali's contribution lay almost as much in his precise technique as in his images. To compel belief in the fantastic and give it the uncanny, apparitional quality he prized as a subversion of normal vision, Dali resorted to a miniaturist's approach: every square millimeter of the licked surface witnessed his desire to render painting transparent, to get rid of everything that intervened between image and decoding. His best work is little short of dream photography. At times, as in Six Images of Lenin on a Piano, 1931, it can still generate an extraordinary sense of silence, alienation and anguish.

To describe one's obsessions in detail may be interesting, if the obsessions are. For a time Dali's were, partly because they were so demented an intrusion of narcissism into the domain of art. George Orwell once said that Dali had (or pretended to have) as good an outfit of perversions as anyone could hope to acquire, but today they seem less shocking. Nevertheless his 1942 autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, is a confessional masterpiece; not all the stories he tells about himself may be true, but they are projected with such absorption as to lend the book the lurid, vignette-like conviction that was already disappearing from his paintings. The central image of his work, his love of anything flaccid — Camembert cheese, art nouveau, melting-wax pelvises — has to do with impotence. With it comes an interest in death, putrefaction, dung and onanism that is filtered through a gaudy parody of Catholic devotional art: the rolling eyeballs, anguished faces and irritable color are part of Dali's Spanish heritage.

Like a gland inflamed by constant scratching, Dali's mind threw off many of these images before they ossified into a repertoire. At what point did the dream images become repetitive? When the public began to recognize and demand them. Perhaps no painter has ever suffered more anxiety about making money after he be came rich, and it was Dali's insecurity that stopped his talent from working, except on the most gratuitous level of publicity mongering, after 1940.
"What interests me about you," Freud is said to have told Dali, "is not your unconscious mind, but your conscious." He was right; not only did the pores of Dab' 's invention stop oozing about 40 years ago, but the repetition of his stock in trade (the nudes with drawers and lip sofas, burning giraffes and lanky, deliquescent women, the double-image paintings of landscape becoming figure in the manner of 16th century puzzle pictures) be came a bore. Of his latest work, with its grand claims to incarnate everything from the secrets of the DNA molecule to Heisenberg's Principle of Uncertainty, the less said the better. If these big, greasily executed machines show anything, it is that Dali's talent was not, after all, a renewable resource.