Volume 52, Number 8 · May 12, 2005
The Energizer
By Sanford Schwartz
Dali
Catalog of the exhibition by Dawn Ades and Michael Taylor
An exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, February 16–May 15, 2005
Philadelphia Museum of Art/Rizzoli,607 pp., 75.00; $48.00 (paper)
For well over half a century, Salvador Dalí has been internationally famous for the sexy and deranged subject matter of his paintings, for his personal nuttiness, flamboyance, and grandiosity, and for the demoralizing way in which he destroyed the borders between creativity and commercial self-promotion. He was a huge character; indeed, he often said, in that simultaneously boastful, cynical, and self-deprecating manner that he perfected, that it was his 'personality' that was his greatest achievement. At other times he might announce to the world that his writing was his real achievement, and his painting the 'least' of him. Yet what is most solid and substantial about Dalí is very specific and not wildly complex qualities: the particular gleaming surfaces of his paintings, with their often large areas of a single, pulsating color; his feeling for the transient, soft light of dawn or dusk and for the brilliantly hard light of a sunny summer afternoon by the Mediterranean; and his astounding ability to delineate and make us feel the simmering strength in tiny, tightly wound concentrations of lines, dots, or shapes.
Review, 5270 words
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