Word: daly
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...incorrigible fabulist, and his autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, is stuffed with lies, inventions and embroideries. Did he really, as he claimed, have to be restrained from throwing himself out of a window on seeing a locust in the room? Did he actually sit in the bar of the Ritz in Madrid and make cocktails out of his own blood? Did he truly associate animal glue, death and dung with sex? And how to square the youthful Dali--whom his fellow students at the Madrid Academy remembered as "bashful," "morbidly shy" and "literally sick with timidity"--with...
...Both Dalis--the disruptive youthful genius and the pretentious, whorish old fanatic--are on full view at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn., in a show of some 70 works titled "Dali's Optical Illusions." Its organizer, Dawn Ades, is one of the most distinguished historians of surrealism, the movement to which Dali's work was central. She has done an excellent job of showing and analyzing the ways in which illusion, the act of making marks that get read as "real," acts in his painting. No illusion, no Dali. This isn't true of other surrealists, or painters...
Since a great deal of the effort of modernist painting was devoted to expelling illusion as a fraud, a lie and a cheat on the deeper impulses of art, one can easily see why Dali's illusionism was so bitterly attacked as mere trickery--an imposture made even worse by Dali's flagrant preference for Raphael and even the arch-academic Meissonier over Matisse or Mondrian, and by his impertinent way of calling true-believer modernists les cocus du vieil art moderne, the cuckolds of old modern art. Dali flew into such flak right from the beginning of his career...
...host of techniques, from psychoanalysis to micro-physics, has begun to describe a world where...reason no longer always seems right." Cinema "encourages us to think in a dreamlike way...[it] slowly but surely filters the most basic of doubts throughout society: that of questioning the value of absolutes." Dali collaborated with Bunuel on two of the underground classics of 20th century film, Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog) and L'Age d'Or (The Golden Age); he was closer to cinema than any other painter of his day, partly because he was obsessed by the power of cinema...
...picture is: Paranoiac-Astral Image, 1934. On a vast and otherwise empty plane of beach flat as a billiard table, four images are dispersed. A fragment of an amphora suggests "deep" time, the Greco-Roman past of the Catalan coast. A distant woman, perhaps the constantly remembered nurse of Dali's childhood, is almost bleached out by the sunlight. In a stranded boat, another woman, probably his muse and wife Gala, confronts a boy in a sailor suit who can be none other than Dali himself. And on the left, the hated figure of Dali's father strides along...