JED PERL
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our heads and give each other incredulous looks. Was Dali 's legendary
signature just becoming sloppier as he signed hundreds of sheets ofblank pa–
per a day? (Now he was putting his John Hancock on the paper as he cut the
deal, often long before the prints were produced.) Or were the prints actually
being signed by someone other than Dali? We didn't know; and nobody will
ever know for sure. Yet the people who came
to
our auctions loved the Dalis
- those prints were Joe America's idea of An.
Dali, who died a year ago at the age of eighty-four, hasn 't left behind
any glow. Reading about his life is a disagreeable experience, because even
the early years in Catalonia - in the city of Figueres, where he was born,
and the fishing village of Cadaques, where the family spent summers - have
become gobbed up by Dali's own mythomania. Dali was named after an
older brother who died short of his second birthday, and so a morbid sense of
twinship haunted the artist's childhood. There are these genuinely engaging
aspects
to
Dali's life: He passed across a series of magnificent backdrops -
early twentieth-century Barcelona, which had already nurtured Gaudi, Pi–
casso, and Mir6 (Mir6's first dealer, Josep Dalmau, was Dali's, too) , and Paris
in the later days of Surrealism. But when we're asked to see everything in
Dali-vision, blurred, fractured, distorted and at the same time harshly overlit,
it's hard
to
maintain much interest.
1 particularly admire one of Dali's earliest paintings - a very plain still
life of some slices of bread in a basket, dated 1926. 1t's tight, dry , and se–
vere; it has a desert-climate clarity that we feel in early Mir6, and that
echoes the Spanish art of the seventeenth century - Zurburan, Sanchez
Cotan, and the early Velazquez. The obviously gifted artist who painted this
singular vision and arrived in Paris at the end of the twenties is recalled in
Andre Thirion's charmingly levelheaded memoir,
Revolutionaries without
Revolution.
"He wore a fine mustache, like the film actor Adolphe Menjou.
Slender, shy, phlegmatic, well-mannered, he had an inexhaustible gift of gab,
which his natural humor and his Spanish accent sprinkled with comical effects.
But he knew when to hold his peace, and he would hold it for a long time,
curled up, attentive and serious, in an easy chair. Enormously intelligent, he
was obviously capable of wrecking any mental construct whatsoever simply
because he was so marvelously funny; he could make everyone but himself
howl with laughter."
Let's remember Dali in 1929, at the point where avant-gardism is
merging with high fashion, and Surrealism, so far as the fashionable world is
concerned, is beginning to resemble Neoromanticism. Within Surrealism itself,
Phase Two has begun, announced in Breton 's
Second Surrealist Manifesto
ofDecember 1929. Andre Masson and Joan Mir6, the two greatest painters
within the movement, are moving out of the orbit of Breton. Mir6 simply
