Salvador Dali's Reputation

Cafe Society
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A couple of years ago I had a chance to visit the Salvador Dali museum in Figueres. It’s a fascinating place that looks exactly as you would imagine a Salvador Dali museum to look, e.g. big and pink with eggs on it. When I was there it was swarming with people carrying Holgas.

I admit that I know very little about Art capital A or indeed art lower-case a. I understand that Dali had a distinctive visual style, and based on the museum he covered a huge amount of ground in different mediums, in fact the photorealistic surrealism that people tend to remember was only part of his portfolio. But I’ve always had the impression that fans of “real” artists in the modern style - Andreas Gursky, Cindy Sherman, Steve McQueen OBE, CBE and so forth - pooh-pooh Dali as a slightly embarrassing conman whose art was a mixture of facile postcards and juvenile symbolism. And that his work has aged badly and is of no more lasting significance than that of e.g. H. R. Giger or Frank Frazetta, and operated on the same level. I suppose there’s an element of hipsterism about him, in the sense that Dali is the kind of artist that average normal people have heard of, which means that he’s no good. Along the lines of, say, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, who win huge contracts and are objectively very successful but there’s a sense that real genuine hipsters don’t rate them.

So, before I embarrass myself in front of my arty friends, is Dali all that? Will his works last? Beyond the idea of setting yourself up as a corporate-friendly brand, what will be his lasting influence? Kids nowadays copy manga, and Magritte is far more trendy if you’re into surrealism. People my age remember him, but it doesn’t take long for a one-time icon to leave the popular memory. E.g. Amy Winehouse, who isn’t exactly forgotten, but it won’t be long before kids on the internet say “who?” when you mention her name. I mean, Black to Black is seven years old by now.

By the end of her career Winehouse had become the artwork, just like Dali, with the problem that people die and if they are the art then the art dies with them.

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He’s safe, at least for now. Name recognition in fine art is the sine qua non for attracting the big bucks at the major auction houses. Surrealism as a movement is showing no signs of slowing in interest, and he’s one of the main reasons.

I’ve been a fine art appraiser for 14 years, and have seen a lot of Dali’s work (and fake Dali’s as well).

But, to give you some hard data, here’s some recent sales of Dali’s works at Sotheby’s:

Portrait of Mrs. Harrison Williams —Feb 5, 2013, London—2.3 Million Pounds (about $4,500,000 US)
Portrait of Mrs. Ortiz-Linares —Feb 19, 2013, London--------662,000 Pounds (about $1,000,000 US)
La Musique-------------------------Feb 19, 2013, London-------5 Million Pounds (about $7,500,000 US)
La Noblesse du Temps-----------Nov 7, 2012, New York City—$750,000

So, sales are healthy, and have been so even through the blight that hit the auction houses in the early 21st Century.

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I will defer to others on the merits of his art, but The Persistence of Memory has long been one of my favourite works of art.

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I’m no art critic but Magritte has often seemed to me to be the more clinical surrealist. My brain enjoys his paintings more but my eyes prefer Dali’s.

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I personally could never get into Dali’s work. I don’t like his brand of surrealism, preferring the work of Magritte and Miro.

That said, I think he was a very talented painter, artist, and marketer. I don’t expect his work or its appeal to go away soon.

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I’m not any kind of art expert, so I could be ignorant of his reputation- but I do love Dali’s work. (And he was my Halloween costume one year.) He was a striver who tried really hard to be weird and some people think you’re better if you act cool. Dali was certainly very aggressive about doing that and people may find that tacky, but the boundary between art and marketing isn’t what it used to be. I think that in large part people have discarded the idea that an artist isn’t supposed to court attention or market his work. And from a technical standpoint I will say he could actually paint, so he wasn’t turning to flashy tactics to cover up the fact that he was a bad artist.

Is his work very much of its time? Sure. It’s very heavily influenced by Freudianism and fear of atomic warfare, to name two things people don’t think about as much these days. I don’t think it’s aged badly, though. I think it speaks strongly to the mind of the person who made it and the particular time he lived in. It’s also true that it’s hard to separate him as an individual from his art: when you see a lot of his work I think you get the sense you’ve gotten uncomfortably deep into his brain. But I think you might get the same feeling if you didn’t know anything about him going in.

It’s interesting to note that the Surrealists didn’t like Dali either, by the way. He stopped following their dictates pretty early on and they voted him out or excommunicated him or whatever clannish art movements do.

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I enjoy some but not all of his work. He was more a showman than an artist. I don’t think he’s in nearly the same league as, say, Rembrandt, Turner or Picasso, but he was an important Surrealist figure and, as long as people care about that, his name will likely endure.

Quoth Wiki: Salvador Dalí - Wikipedia

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I will say that Premonition of Civil War is a better take on the subject than Guernica (and way beyond Robert Motherwell’s Elegy to the Spanish Republic). Tempered with the recognition that Dali came back home to cuddle up to the Francoist once the dust had settled and they’d had their fill of shooting homosexuals.

For us, post-Warhol and Damien Hirst, it’s no big deal if an artist uses art as a business model, and not a bold cry for freedom. Heck, that’s really what those old masters were doing, right?* But Dali came along when shilling was bad form, and used the revolutionary Surrealist Movement as a public conveyance to the bank. Big A art never forgave him for that. (Picasso flirted with Dada & Surrealism too, but just to stop in and say "sure, I can do this stuff too. If I wanted too. Bye.)

Was Dali a great artist, or a technically skilled huckster? I know I don’t see in any Dali what I want to find. The sort of thing I do find in Max Ernst or Joseph Cornell.

*Goya was the last of the Old Masters, and he milked the Spanish Bourbons for 40 years, painting what they paid him to paint. But that’s a fraction of what we remember of him. Where are Andy Warhol and Damien Hirst’s versions of Goya’s Black Paintings? Done just for themselves and full of humanity, devoid of salability?

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I used to like Dali’s work. I still like Persistence of Memory and The Last Supper and a handful of others. But after going through the Catalogue Raisonne of all his known works four times in two years, I’m really tired of him auto-sodomizing himself.

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It’s iconic. My first memory of it is as an illustration for an article on relativity in Science Digest. Those melting clocks are an excellent metaphor for the uncertainty of simultaneity.

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A purported Dali quote: “I don’t use drugs! I AM drugs!”

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I don’t know how Dali will be ranked in the historical pantheon of artists. But he is my personal favorite. The aspect of his work that engages me the most is the multi-level imagery. He takes this to levels I have not seen in any other artist. Not just the simple vase/two faces, young girl/old hag type of ambiguous imagery.

I was first struck by this when viewing the painting called The Hallucenogenic Toreador in a small gallery in Cleveland, Ohio, that eventually became the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida.

I enjoyed several of the smaller paintings, but there was one huge canvas on a wall by itself. It was the only painting in the gallery that had a bench in front of it. There was a gallery employee explaining some of the details of the painting, but the title didn’t make any sense. But the painting was engaging enough that I took a seat on the bench and just stared at it for about 30 minutes. Suddenly something happened in my brain and the entire painting suddenly resolved into a portrait of a toreador. I almost gasped out loud when it happened. It was like when you finally manage to see the image in one of those Magic Eye 3D images, but much more profound. The difference is, in those images, until you look at it a certain way, there is nothing but an abstact pattern. With Dali, even if you don’t resolve the larger image, you can still enjoy the smaller, sub-images as complete works of art in themselves.

Besides learning how profoundly different something can appear depending on how you look at it, I learned why people will pay millions of dollars for original artwork. Until then, my attitude was, why pay all that money for the original when you could just buy a good print? After my epiphany, I went to the gallery shop looking for a print of the Hallucenogenic Toreador. They had them. They had posters, postcards, slides, etc. But none of them were the same. That’s when I understood.

There are other paintings of his that have this multi-level construction, but I consider the Toreador to be his masterpiece in this area. I’ve met people who are Dali fans and have books with prints of his works who haven’t realized all the levels in some of his pieces. Another one that many people don’t fully see is Apparition of a Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach–many people don’t see the dog. Same with Metamorphosis of Narcissus.

There’s another one that you really have to see the original to appreciate. It’s called Six Flies and a Model. It’s a small picture with an actual smashed dead fly, and six drawing of smashed dead flies. If you look really closely, you can pick out the real fly. But it’s not immediately obvious. That’s an example of the extraordinary level of observation and technical draftsmanship he brings.

Since I don’t judge the value of things strictly by their market price, I don’t really care if Dali paintings prove to be good long-term investments. He will always be one of my favorite artists.