Word: daly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...mythomaniac autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, he took pains to spin out a fiction of his early originality. He wanted people to think he'd been found like Moses in the bulrushes, a miracle child: Salvador, Saviour. In part this did correspond to the truth. As Ian Gibson's fascinating catalog essay on Dali's early life makes clear, little Salvador was a horribly spoiled brat. Cosseted, deferred to, aware that a tantrum could get him anything he wanted, he grew up with serious delusions of creative omnipotence -- which, as time went by, coexisted with equally serious problems...
...painter a worse embarrassment than Salvador Dali? Not even Andy Warhol. Long before his physical death in 1989, old Avida Dollars -- Andre Breton's anagram of his name -- had collapsed into wretched exhibitionism. Genius, Shocker, Lip-Topiarist: though he once turned down an American businessman's proposal to open a string of what would be called Dalicatessens, there was little else he refused to endorse, from chocolates to perfumes. He was surrounded by fakes and crooks and married to one of the greediest harpies in Europe: Gala, who made him the indentured servant of his lost talent even...
Nevertheless, Dali was an important artist for about 10 years, starting in the late 1920s. Nothing can take that away from him. Other Surrealists -- especially Max Ernst and Dali's fellow Catalan Joan Miro -- were greater magicians; but Dali's sharp, glaring, enameled visions of death, sexual failure and deliquescence, of displaced religious mania and creepy organic delight, left an ineradicable mark on our century when it, and he, were young. Dali turned "retrograde" technique -- the kind of dazzlingly detailed illusionism that made irreality concrete, as in The First Days of Spring, 1929 -- toward subversive ends. His soft watches will...
...what of Dali's own clockwork? What wound him up? This is the theme of "Salvador Dali: The Early Years," an exhibition opening this week at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art. The curators, Ana Beristain and Dawn Ades, have brought together a mass of Dali's juvenilia, starting at age 12; the show ends in 1929, with Dali in Paris, moving through storms of controversy, the 25-year-old darling of both Left and Right Banks. By rights this show ought to contain the "classics" of Dali's early achievement -- paintings from 1929 like The Lugubrious Game...
Surrealism was fascinated by childhood, viewing it as the primal forest of the imagination -- the place where all the id's most succulent and aggressive life-forms ran rampant, before civilization paved them over. Hence you could suppose that Dali's own childhood would be rich in suggestion about his mature work. And so it was, in a way; but not the way he meant...