JED PERL
139
plained his rejection of the by then notorious Spaniard in terms of the artist's
Fascist sympathies and lust for money. This is a case in which high living
does go along with bad art - so Breton , who concocted that dazzling ana–
gram, "Avida Dollars," could feel justified in the thought that great art is
produced by sober people.
As
it happens, during the thirties and forties , some
of Dali's best inventions were among his most unabashedly commercial- the
collaborations with the fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli, the decorations for
the pages of
Vogue
and
Hmpds
Baw.ar.
When Dali turned a shoe into a hat
or splattered his signature motifs over the glossy magazines, he was showing
the world that the only fantasy life worth living was the fantasy life of com–
merce. And some of those conceits - like the lobster-ornamented organza
evening dress he designed with Schiaparelli - are suffused with the hyper–
bolic mood of Europe on the brink of World War II. Fashion was the perfect
vehicle for an artist who never had a very firm grasp on the fantasy life of
art itself. Dali's escapades in
hallte couture
are among the least fussy, most
authentically engaging things he ever did.
Dividing his time among ew York, Paris, and Spain, Dali careened
through the postwar decades , an ever more absurd character. In the biogra–
phy, there comes a point where you start skipping pages - it's all such non–
sense. When an artist somehow shows us that he really loves art - well, then
there's an awful lot of nonsense we'll accept. De Chirico had a grasp of
painting, and so even his kitsch attracts us , draws us in. And even Picasso's
worst antics - the clown impersonations recorded in David Douglas Duncan's
book,
Private World oj Pablo Pirasso
-
are of some interest, because we
know there's a real person somewhere in there (we know it because we
know that only real people make real art). Dali's craziness is another matter;
it doesn't resonate. The oversized work of his later years is pallid . Dali
cranks up his surrealist machinery, but there's no element of risk. Those
Hollywood-scale religious extravaganzas remain locked up in Dali's mind -
mental constructs with no pictorial life
to
them. And the life, the life: how can
we get caught up in the flamboyant clothes, the dinners at Trader Vics in
New York with the hippy hangers-on , when there's nobody at the heart of
the carnival? And all the speculation about life with Gala - did she really
control him? Was she a manipulative monster? - is just star gossip.
For the public that bought his prints, Dali became an adorable monster.
Whatever might have been threatening about his eccentricities was defused
by the publicity mills. Dali is the Liberace of modern art. His personality was
so theatrically overdetermined that it began to look tame - as tamely
domesticated as the pet ocelot, defanged and declawed, that he led around on
aleash. Though Dali wasn't the only artist who wanted to market his work
among the American middle class - prints by Picasso, Matisse, Braque,
