Visual Arts Review: Salvador Dalí Touches Down on Huntington Avenue – Quirky and Proud of It

By Trevor Fairbrother

For decades the MFA gave Dalí the cold shoulder, so it’s great that this maiden voyage is non-puritanical and open to the artist’s less than wholesome instincts to provoke.

Salvador Dalí, detail of the upper section of The Ecumenical Council, 1960. Photo: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

The exhibition Dalí: Disruption and Devotion, on view at the Museum of Fine Arts through December 1, is quirky and proud of it. It is a sustained intermixing of pictures by Surrealism’s poster boy and the kinds of historic art that he admired, emulated, and preyed on. There are works on paper, but paintings predominate. With the exception of two book projects, all the Dalís come from the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. All the historical works are from the MFA’s European collection.

There are 23 paintings by Dalí. Here are notes on several splendid examples, listed in chronological order:

Self-Portrait (Cadaqués), about 1918. Painted in his mid-teens, this small exhilarating work depicts an artist seated in a studio overlooking a vibrant seascape. It shows Dalí exploring the saturated colors and assertive brushstrokes that diverse post-impressionists had explored since the 1890s.

Girl’s Back, 1926. The artist chooses to ignore his sister’s face and focuses on three spellbinding coils of black hair hanging against her exposed back. At this juncture Dalí venerates Vermeer and Velázquez as “great Realist painters” and dreams of going to Brussels to copy pictures by Dutch Old Masters.

The First Days of Spring, 1929. The artist manifests his arrival as a diehard Surrealist in a Freudian dreamscape. The bizarre characters in a sharply-receding empty plane include stock Victorian figures, glum sexual fetishists, and outlandish chimeras recalling those in Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (a treasure of the Prado Museum and a touchstone for Dalí).

Salvador Dalí, Oeufs sur le Plat sans le Plat, 1932. Photo: David Deranian, courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Oeufs sur le Plat sans le Plat, 1932. Three fried eggs are the focus of a still life with a forbidding building and a distant horizon whose rocks suggest reclining figures. One lubricious egg is suspended from a string rendered with magical micro-precision. In 1935 Dalí expressed pride in his ability to render objects with “the most imperialist fury of precision.”

The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory, 1952-54. Only ten inches tall, this is an identically scaled new version of his 1931 Surrealist masterpiece The Persistence of Memory (acquired by New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1934). The earlier work featured Dalí’s signature motif: limp pocket watches that are visually reminiscent of melting Camembert cheese and symbolically attuned to Einsteinian notions of time and space. The Disintegration updates the earlier composition for the age of nuclear physics: an 3D rectilinear grid framework now coexists with the same weird coastal landscape.

The Ecumenical Council, 1960. Almost ten feet tall, this painting exemplifies the artist’s midlife return to Catholicism and his efforts to connect religious mysticism and modern science. At the bottom of the composition Dalí masquerades as Velázquez standing beside a blank canvas; the kneeling figure of Saint Helena is a likeness of his wife Gala; the interior architecture in St. Peter’s, Rome, towers at the apex, and serves as the backdrop for nebulous evocations of the Holy Trinity.

The MFA’s spiffy installation funnels visitors through zigzagging spaces on a journey divided into themes – fantasy, nightmare and Surrealism; “Mining the Past;” Not So Still Life;” Christian iconography; the passage of time. Strong wall colors – scarlet, purple and ochre – signal the transitions. Ingeniously, the works by Dalí are consistently highlighted by being hung on white panels or walls. Some of the spaces feel confined and some sections are densely hung. The installation includes a timeline of the artist’s life and a good introductory video, although they are not presented until the midpoint of the installation, in a zone where the visitor path makes a U-turn. Likewise, I would have preferred to see Dalí’s pre-Surrealist paintings as a group, preferably near the start of the exhibition.

The pleasures of time travel and the price that time exacts are central to Dalí: Disruption and Devotion, and the show is very rewarding when experienced with those ideas in mind. I was slow to find that groove, in part because of the fumbling beginning sections. The foyer overwhelms and underserves a jewel: the ’50s remake of the floppy-clocks painting. That canvas could have made a more epiphanic contribution had it appeared later in the show, placed in insightful dialogue with other pictures. On the other hand, the Boston Globe‘s critic liked the impulse to open “by giving the people what they want.”

Salvador Dalí , The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory, 1952‑54. Photo: courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Subjective quibbles aside, the co-curators (Frederick Ilchman and Julia Welch, both of the MFA’s Art of Europe department) made some inspired and impactful pairings. The juxtaposition of El Greco’s Saint Dominic in Prayer (around 1605) and Dalí’s Sainte Hélène à Port Lligat (1956) is haunting. Each is set in a moody grayish landscape that underscores the solemnity and spiritual isolation of private worship. The differences in body language are equally compelling: the earlier figure inward and fraught, the other statuesque and symbolically resilient. (While not relevant to the show, the fact that Edgar Degas, the most exacting Impressionist, owned the El Greco weaves its own spell.) It was also a treat to contemplate a Dalí landscape (Shades of Night Descending, 1931) hanging beside a Flemish allegorical painting (Vanitas Still Life, 1667–68 by Cornelis Norbertus Gijsbrechts). The Dali imagines a shrouded figure of indefinite sex in a flatland with craggy rock formations and rapidly advancing shadows. The Gijsbrechts is a mimetic representation of a dilapidated ensemble including a skull, a bubble, a toppled hourglass, and the illusion that the top right corner of the canvas is torn and frayed. Both pictures are ghostly, melancholic, and irrational.

This is the first Dalí exhibition that the MFA has presented: nothing to be proud of, certainly, but a refreshing step. If it were a library book its content would have to be marked “Contains Adult Themes.” One very small painting is brazenly titled Atmospheric Skull Sodomizing a Grand Piano (1934). Then there’s Two Adolescents (1954), which presents naked teen angels assuming the poses of hunky male figures conceived by Michelangelo. For decades the MFA gave Dalí the cold shoulder, so it’s great that this maiden voyage is non-puritanical and open to the artist’s less than wholesome instincts to provoke.

Details of two works by Salvador Dalí, The First Days of Spring, 1929, and Two Adolescents, 1954. Photo: Trevor Fairbrother

The art of the past played a pivotal role in Dalí’s artistic journey throughout his career. In that light it makes sense that the MFA’s maiden voyage with Dalí taps into its European motherlode to situate his work in a particular historical arc. Museums that undertake contextualizing projects on Dalí usually examine his modernity in relation to that of such individualist peers as René Magritte, Marcel Duchamp, Walt Disney, and Andy Warhol. The Dalí Museum in St Petersburg does this, but it has occasionally chosen to focus on the artist’s abiding interest in the past: in 2007 it presented Dalí & The Spanish Baroque and last year Dalí & the Impressionists: Monet, Degas, Renoir & More in 2023. In preparing this review I realized there must have been a trade arrangement between The Dalí and the MFA. All the Impressionist paintings in the 2023 show in St Petersburg were borrowed from Boston, and now, almost all the Dalís on view at the MFA are loans from Florida.

It is important to emphasize that none of the Dalí paintings was directly inspired by or copied from the Boston works with which they currently hang. The MFA’s only goal was to demonstrate the visual similarities they share. I see Dalí’s stance in the context of Ezra Pound’s modernist imperative “Make It New.” It spurred writers and artists to be innovative and revolutionary while remembering that the “new” is never autonomous because the past is the context from which the present is made. Congratulations to Ilchman and Welch for creating Dalí: Disruption and Devotion and for making Dalí new and old for the MFA.

© 2024 Trevor Fairbrother

When curator of contemporary art at the MFA in the 1990s Trevor Fairbrother steered some surrealism-inflected works into the collection: Cross Purposes, 1974, by Jess; Tree of Life, 1976, by Ana Mendieta; Filzwinkel, 1985, by Joseph Beuys; Untitled, 1988, by Doris Salcedo; The Enunciation, 1992, by Mark Tansey; and Untitled, 1993, by Ann Hamilton.