Exhibitions 3
Salvador Dali: A Mythology (Tate Gallery, Liverpool, till 31 January)
The Freud connection
Andrew Lambirth
People's reactions to the current Dali exhibition in Liverpool were depressingly similar — 'what, another one?' Well, you can see their point. Earlier this year there was a show in Brighton which celebrated the great collector and patron Edward James and which featured a substantial clutch of good early Dalis. In 1994 there was a major exhibition at the Hayward Gallery entitled Dali — the Early Years, selected by the co-curator of this Liverpool show, Dawn Ades. Last year the distin- guished hispanophile Ian Gibson published a massive biography (The Shameful Life of Salvador Dali, Faber £30), and at least one controversial journalist gleefully denounced Dali as an impostor and a fraud.
The heartening thing at Liverpool was to find crowds of mostly young people, surg- ing with shy curiosity around the minutely- painted Dalinian nightmares. Each new generation seems to discover Dali with renewed shock. Does he then possess a timeless appeal?
The exhibition consists of some 30 paint- ings and 25 works on paper, many on loan from the Salvador Dali Museum in St Petersburg, Florida, which rarely lends work. Since the general consensus is that Dali's early period is his best (it must be time for a proper re-examination of the middle career and later work), this show concentrates on the 1930s. Its theoretical aim is to examine the artist's engagement with myth and legend. For instance, his attitude to the ideas of Sigmund Freud, his use of pre-existing myths, and his relation- ship with the Catholic religion. Dali is per- haps best known for creating his own myth: the outrageous showman with waxed mous- tache flaunting live ants on his face or lec- turing in a diving suit. This can get in the way of a serious consideration of his work, and it is probably to be deplored that in the exhibition's anteroom a BBC documentary on Dali's life is being shown. (This space is aptly shared with a selection of large blow- up photographs of the artist in various atti- tudes, and a shop purveying Dali-inspired merchandise.) But the show only really begins with an impressive introductory room of artefacts borrowed from the Freud Museum in Lon- don. These include a Roman plaster relief of the striding figure of Gravida (an impor- tant actor in Dali's personal mythology), a bromide print of Leonardo's 'Virgin and Child with St Anne and John the Baptist', and an engraving of the Sphinx of Giza. In addition, there are photographs of Freud working at his desk, the Master's annotated copy of Wilhelm Jensen's story Gravida, Salvador Dali's 'Archaeological Reminiscence of Millet's Angelus, 1933-35 and Dali's brilliant and finely spun pen and ink drawing of Freud. The show thus begins with a museum-like seriousness which is inspiring, though possibly lost on younger visitors.
It's almost as if the exhibition's hidden agenda is the relationship between Dali and Freud. Why not be open about it? If this is the real subject of the show, it is also its unique selling point and should be trum- peted as such. We don't need just another survey show — a theme would help a new reading of the work and re-focus our flag- ging attention. The best of Dali will always be worth looking at, but if you're already familiar with the work, it's sometimes hard to summon up the requisite enthusiasm.
Dali was the Great Appropriator, steal- ing from any source that would be useful to him, filching age-old symbolic narratives and adapting them to his own ends. We are shown this in action, for instance, in his use of the William Tell story. He first read Freud's Interpretation of Dreams in a Span- ish translation in 1925. Dali's own book, The Tragic Myth of Millet's Angelus, is writ- ten exactly like a Freudian case history. (A small side room is the second documentary display in the exhibition, focusing on the angelus, mostly through photographs.) `Couple with their Heads Full of Clouds', the first painting to greet you as you enter the main body of the show, is a double por- trait of Dali with wife Gala, intriguingly empty-headed in the pose of the couple in Millet's famous painting.
Dali met Freud only once, in London in 1938, and the meeting was not a great suc- cess. Dali, who admitted to 'a real vice of self-interpretation', was far too knowing for the father of psychoanalysis. But the Freud portrait came directly out of their meeting, one of the most evocative and moving like- nesses Dali ever created. Their real rela- tionship was one of inspiration: Freud the father figure supplying ideas for the bril- liant but eternally erring son; Dali with his simulated paranoiac perception treading the bounds of delusion and irrationality in search of subject matter.
The work on show ranges from the straightforwardly descriptive 'Girls with Curls' of 1926, a traditionally attractive image with early evidence of the Dali but- tock fetish, to 'Portrait of My Dead Broth- er' (1963), a face formed from molecular structures which are also pairs of cherries. Dali was fascinated by doubles and cou- ples, though, in this case, the testicular doubling was an undisputed sign of the son. Dali's art stands or falls by his abilities as a draughtsman — he is more an image- maker than a pure painter. The 44 prints in `Les Chants .de Maldoror' (1934) give a good indication of his quality and inven- tion. One of the finest ink drawings is a headless `Gravida' like spun glass or a piece of delicate and perfect music. More often than not, Dali the Mad Miniaturist convinces through overwhelming detail.
Elsewhere there are passages of hallu- cinogenic detail against large fields of slip- pery paint, for instance in the rocky background of 'Remorse' from 1931. Colouristically, a number of these paintings are not as sharp as you might expect — the hues are sludgy, turgid even. But this was deliberate: the colours are intended to por- tray putrefaction and decay. In Dali's work everything depends on the quality of his imagination, which is often so fevered as to be sick. But we should expect this: when Dali first joined the Surrealists he warned them to expect nothing but 'disappoint- ment, distaste and repulsion'.
Dali operated on the interface between art and showbiz. Warhol acknowledged him as a pioneer of happenings. Dali him- self was fond of observing that the only dif- ference between himself and a madman was that he wasn't mad. No, indeed, he was far too interested in control, in orchestrat- ing his eccentric behaviour. The real threat was that, by laying himself on the line so thoroughly, he would end in self-cannibal- ism.
The Tate Gallery, Liverpool is open from Tuesday to Sunday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m.
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