Word: daly
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...youth. He is not expected to mature, but simply to become an older virtuoso, so that all his later work risks being dismissed as an appendage to the earlier. If he accepts this role, it grips him, and he turns into a vulgar monster-something like Salvador Dali. If he fights it and reflects the blame for it on the audience (where it belongs), he may, with luck, come to resemble Robert Rauschenberg, whose latest prints-after a run at the Castelli Gallery in New York City-are on view at Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles...
...this bleak landscape, there are a few interesting outcroppings. One is a kind of surrealism that owes more to Hieronymus Bosch than to Salvador Dali. The best examples, currently at the Aberbach Gallery, are the works of Miodrag Djuric Dado, a Yugoslav painter who works in France. His L 'Hôpital has a jolting impact: beyond the window is the peaceful French village where Dado now lives. Inside, a demon in the shape of an owl crouches by the central crucifix, near the dancing man and his maimed and malevolent companion. A rotund dwarf grins and looks away...
Among the many big names represented by trivia (Braque, Chagall, Dali, Boccioni, Gauguin, Sutherland), Picasso makes an appearance with two very routine pottery plates decorated with fish; presumably someone thought the old satyr of Vallauris was ruminating on the Christian ichthus...
There was also generally in the surrealists a theatrical state of mind, which in the case of Paul Delvaux became virtually a stock in trade. Originally an expressionist, Delvaux was a latecomer to surrealism, converted by an exhibition of works by Chirico, Magritte and Dali that he saw in Brussels in 1934 when he was 37. And though he is one of the more durable surrealist artists, his imagery-as the selection of his work here indicates-constantly hovers on the edge of cliche. The Delvaux "look" is unmistakable: an empty street of neoclassical façades, a 19th century...
...landscape on an easel in front of a window and continuous with the "real" painted landscape seen beyond, have virtually become surrealist icons) remain unpredictable despite their familiarity. That is because Magritte was such a virtuoso of the insoluble, the contradictory, the locked. Unlike Delvaux (or for that matter Dali, Masson or Ernst), Magritte had absolutely no interest in what seemed romantic, chancy, theatrically mysterious or exotic. He called his paintings "material tokens of the freedom of thought," and materiality is of their essence...