Antics Aside, a Dalí of Constant Ambition

Erik S. Lesser for The New York Times

“The Maximum Speed of Raphael’s Madonna” (1954) is one of the paintings included in the exhibition “Dalí: The Late Work,” at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta.     *
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ATLANTA — Salvador Dalí’s late work started unusually early. He was born in 1904 and soon displayed a precocious skill for ultra-refined hyperrealism. By the late 1920s he had painted some of the smallest, most peculiar masterpieces of Surrealism. Within a decade he was widely

seen as having entered — again precociously — a decline that became ever more precipitous, exacerbated by relentless self-promotion, shameless hucksterism and a fervent return to Roman Catholicism.

Museum of Modern Art/Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dali, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Dalí‘s “Debris of an Automobile Giving Birth to a Blind Horse Biting a Telephone,” an early “late” work from 1938, is a riposte to Picasso’s “Guernica,” as well as a technical tour de force of scratching and rubbing through black paint laid over white. 

“Dalí: The Late Work” at the High Museum of Art here largely lays waste to the presumption that late Dalí is bad Dalí, and that most Dalí is late.

In so doing it joins other exhibitions that have done their share to loosen the grip of canonical European and American painting and sculpture on the history of art. While forces like multiculturalism, anti-colonialism and the various liberation movements have done much more to make art history bigger, messier and truer, there have also been what might be called inside jobs: expansions of the canon from within. These include reconsiderations of the perennially disdained “late work” of established 19th- and 20th-century painters like Dalí, fresh assessments that have helped overturn closely held notions of connoisseurship, quality and historical significance, while eroding the cult of youth.

Again and again it has been demonstrated that the unpredictable cocktail of fading energy and seasoned talent, of mortality and desperation (just another word for ambition) can accomplish wonders. This summer began with a perturbing show of late Renoir at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Over the past couple of years important exhibitions of late Picasso and the late work of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner brightened the New York gallery scene. Kandinsky’s late work more than held up its end of the Guggenheim’s retrospective in 2009. Late Picabia has been one of the cornerstones of postmodern painting, and in the 1970s Philip Guston’s late works unfolded as living proof that it’s not over until it’s over. Jasper Johns and Lucien Freud perform similar feats now.

On first perusal the High Museum exhibition seems destined to confirm art-world assumptions about Dalí. There are definitely some not-so-great, possibly terrible paintings here, including the commissioned portraits, like the one of Walt Disney. It turns out that the only person Dalí painted convincingly was his wife, sidekick and handler, Gala. In addition Dalí is overwhelmingly present — in photographs, on film, in quotations emblazoned on the wall — and is often fairly obnoxious, eyes abulge, signature mustache adroop.

In the opening gallery he does parlor tricks with his facial hair, shaping his mustache into a paint brush, bull’s horns and a dollar sign. The second gallery is devoted to his exuberant collaborations with the photographer Philippe Halsman. Dalí glowers at a rhinoceros; he leaps into the air amid a swath of flung cats and water. He paints a Medusa’s head on Gala’s forehead, and apes Velázquez’s painting “Las Meninas” against a woozy backdrop of gingham.

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