104
PARTISAN REVIEW
TRENDS IN EXHIBITIONS
In November the Bignou Gallery opened a Dali Exhibition, also
publishing a two sheet Newspaper, Dali News: Monarch of the Dailies
by Dali.
" . . . I decided this time to write all that I should like to read
in the papers by myself."
The guinea-pig-role for testing profits which industry has assigned
to contemporary art, is well documented in the following ex'Cerpt from
his movie-column: "My movie agent ... ordered a nightmare from me,
by telephone. It was for the film
Spellbound.
They adore all that you
are doing at the Selznick studio, but I want to caution you, for the
moment they want to use you only in small drops. . . . I said: In
order to create this impression, I will have to hang fifteen of the
heaviest and most lavishly sculpted pianos possible from the ceiling of
the ballroom, swinging very low over the heads of the dancers. These
would be in exalted dance poses, but would not move at all, they would
only be diminishing silhouettes in a very accelerated perspective, losing
themselves in infinite darkness.... Some days after I went to the studios
to film the scene ... and I was stupefied at seeing neither the pianos nor
the cut silhouettes ... but right then someone pointed out to me some
tiny pianos in miniature hanging from the ceiling and about 40 live
dwarfs who, according to experts, would give perfectly the effect of
perspective that I desired.
I thought I was dreaming
. . . Result: the
pianos didn't at all give the impression of real pianos ... for another
expert imitated the shadows of the pianos with false shadows ... and
the dwarfs, one saw, simply, that they were dwarfs. [n truth the Holly–
wood experts ... have surpassed me."
Dali describes the latest style of his painting as being "... like a
Chardin painted by Vermeer."
At Rosenberg Jean Helion continues his metamorphosis from non–
objective painting to realistic representation.
Dorothea Tanning will show her first stage decor in February. It is
a setting for Rieti's new ballet "Night Shadow" with Balanchine's cho–
reography for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo.
The magazine
View
presented an Exhibition of the Fantastic
in Modern Art, the same aspect it has championed since its start.
With it the new Hugo Gallery was opened at East 55th Street. In the
foreword of the catalogue Parker Tyler writes: "Irrefutably present on
these walls is a maximum evidence that the militant role of the fan–
tastic, the contradiction of routine, mechanical, rational experience,
against which art has eternally set its face, continues in the hands of
artists-hands which have transformed daydreams into concrete images."
F.
J.
K.
