`Show offers glimpse into Dali`

By Joe Pinchot
Herald Staff Writer

In a 1962 book about painter Salvador Dali, art curator Theodore Rousseau noted that as time passes people forget about the details and opinions of an artist’s life, and the art is left to maintain fame or allow its erosion.

Dali died in 1989 and his publicity-loving ways ebbed before then, but he still is often known for being the artist with the mustache who liked to mug for a camera. His work is remembered as weird and bizarre by most people.

A small show of 21 Dali works at the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, borrowed from the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Fla., isn’t exactly comprehensive, but it provides a way to start a serious consideration of Dali, the artist.

Although best known as a Surrealist — he was officially expelled from the movement in 1934 after a dispute with Andre Breton — Dali was grounded in artistic tradition, owing a debt to Raphael, Vermeer, Velasquez, Bosch and van Eyck and Durer. Elements of modern schools of abstraction, cubism, pop art, politics and spiritualism also showed up, and when he set his mind to it, he was an exacting realist.

Like most artists, Dali knew early on he wanted to paint, but it took a while to find a direction for his talents. Two early works in the Warhol show are very unlike what is thought of as Daliesque. “The Lane at Port Lligat” from 1922-23 is an impressionistic landscape and “The Basket of Bread” — which was first shown in Pittsburgh in 1928 — from 1926 is a still-life.

By 1930, when Dali produced “The Hand — Remorse,” he had found his niche in Surrealism. The background is a dark blue sky with stringy clouds, and large steps heading to a beach with tiny people frolicking. The main image is a man sitting on a pedestal. He cries blood and the seat of his pants shows he has, as parents of young children would say, had an accident. His left hand is huge, larger than his body, and reaches out clumsily. The image brings to mind isolation and thoughts of a terrible tragedy.

There was frequently an inside-joke quality to Surrealist art, such as “Dionysus Spitting the Complete Image of Cadaques on the Tip of the Tongue of a Three-Storied Gaudinian Woman.” Several artistic styles are present in this tiny but complex composition, which is vulgarly funny. With its whimsical rendering of body parts, particularly sexual organs, it’s a scholarly work fit for a locker room.

While the best-known Dali works are not here, a couple of Dali masterpieces suffice. “Three Young Surrealist Women Holding in their Arms the Skins of the Orchestra” shows three pleasingly proportioned women with flowering bushes for heads. They hold instruments that melt or dissolve into the pure white sand of the beach.

“Nature Morte Vivante (Still Life-Fast Moving)” is a virtuostic technical achievement of levitating fruit, knife and other elements, with a surrealistically twisting fruit bowl, and a vast seascape upon which a lattice shadow is cast.

The final work in the show, “Portrait of My Dead Brother,” shows the head of the man formed by a grid of bubbles against a hazy, barren landscape. Little figures off the sides go about their business. It seems emotionally remote, yet reverent. Dali was expressing personal thoughts, in a language far from universal.

The 20 paintings and one sculpture are on display through Sept. 20. Information: (412) 237-8300.

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Updated August 13, 1998
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