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PARTISAN REVIEW
drifts away, while Masson announces that he's now a "dissident" Surrealist.
Automatism - the unfettered linear arabesque that in the hands of Masson
and Mira was Surrealism's radical contribution to pictorial art - isn't men–
tioned in the
Second Manifesto.
Breton, who around the same time writes an
~
introduction to the catalogue of Dali's first show in Paris, is turning his atten-
I
tion toward a different sort of painting.
While the weirdly accessorized dream worlds of the early Dalis could ,
have been hatched only in the wake of Freud, the artist's technique was
premodern and even antimodern - a throwback to the late nineteenth cen–
tury academicians who had imitated the smooth tonal transitions of
photography. (Dali was a great admirer of that arch-academic, Meissonier.)
The transformation of natural forms into the not-quite natural or the some–
thing-other-than-natural had been an element in art since Cubism; but no
matter how outlandish the imagery became in the work of De Chirico and
Picasso, their experimental brushwork and lively surfaces were an extension
of the improvisatory styles of the impressionists and Postimpressionists. Dati
rejected the developing conventions of modern painting by rendering forms
sculpturally and setting them into a very deep space.
As
much as the strange
dream-visions, it was the old-fashioned spatial constructions that gave his
early work its air of provocation. Dali's slicked-up surface carried a De
Chirico-Picasso baggage of dreams into fantasies ot unprecedented
theatricality. Working on a tiny scale at the end ot the twenties, Dali was
making Surrealist Faberges - toys to gawk at. Parisian culture could no
longer support an aesthetic of formal purity; but it remained for Dali to
demonstrate exactly how megalomaniacally baroque impurity could become.
The small-sized Oalis of the end of the twenties left Andre Breton
"wonderstruck" (Thieron's word): but at the same time, as Thieron explains,
their "virtuosity worried Breton." "We wondered," he goes on, "whether
larger formats wouldn't make Dali's paintings look like photographic blow-ups.
The year 1931 proved us wrong." I would disagree. I believe they were
proven right. Some ha\'e claimed to see a Flemish accuracy in Dali's painting
of the 1930s and i940s ; but he has none of the clarity of form or of color
that gives even the most horrific dreams of Bosch and Breughel their lyric
beauty. Dali's renderings are grimly literal (in the manner of the nineteenth–
century
pompiers)
or woozily fioll1tastical (in the manner of Gustave Moreau).
Actually, I'd take the best ofa nineteenth-century academic like Meissonier
over most any Dali. Some of those Meissoniers give a minor pleasure - the
pleasure ofa dull, consistent virtuosity. Dali isn't a virtuoso. His drawing is
lumpish. His color is metallic - like tarnished brass. He presents muddle–
headed dreams in a muddle-headed way.
When Breton changed his mind about Dali in the late thirties he ex-
