Word: daly
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...years since Salvador Dali separated from the surrealist movement, he has leaped from one extravagant triviality to the next, combining the roles of circus freak, spangled elephant and Barnum himself. The performance is tinted with sadness. Dali is undoubtedly the last of the great dandies, but nobody accepts his own belief that he is the last of the great artists, heir to Vermeer and Velásquez. The baroque costume jewelry, the monarchist-Catholic oratory, the worn stock of crutches and soft watches-all have dust on them. Even the trembling antennas of that fabled mustache have apparently ceased...
...Dali's latest attempt at a comeback is his current show at Knoedler's in Manhattan. It is a lugubrious event, more rummage sale than exhibition. Though it was not conceived as a retrospective, it spans about four decades of his output and so gives some sense of the appalling decline that his talent has suffered. To see some of Dali's best early work, like the tiny Specter of Sex Appeal (1934), is almost to confront a different painter: somewhere along the line that nightmarish distinctness and mystery of image, in which every speck of paint...
...recent years, Dali has tried to give his work a quasiscientific dimension by toying with such themes as Einstein's theory of relativity and the discovery of the DNA spiral. The latest Nobel laureate to experience his attentions is Dr. Dennis Gabor, the inventor of holography. A holograph, made with laser beams, has the property of accurately reproducing an object in three dimensions. "All artists," proclaims Dali, "have been concerned with three-dimensional reality since the time of Velásquez, and in modern times the analytic Cubism of Picasso tried again to capture the three dimensions...
...house may be new, but its cupboards are rather bare. The images are banal-a Yale basketball player leaping upward "in the process of becoming an angel"; card players at a table, in homage to Cézanne, superimposed on fragments of a Velásquez as background. Dali has simply made use of a different medium for all his old and familiar mannerisms. ·Robert Hughes
...would be pleasant to report that all rumors of the maestro's decline are greatly exaggerated. But they are not. No 20th century artist - not even Dali - went down so fast. The homage at the Cultural Center is a lugubrious affair, but an interesting one nevertheless; for it records in great detail how one gifted painter went backward under pressure, like an irritated crab, into a historical impasse - and has stuck there ever since, snapping his crusty pincers at every stir in the water...