The Persistence of Dali : Often Criticized, the Surrealist Left a Lasting Imprint on Pop Art

Salvador Dali, who died Monday at age 84, was the Trickster from the Tarot cards. He was the ultimate charlatan in the satin-lined evening cape whose game was so pathetically transparent you could see the rabbits in the bottom of the hat.

More than a half-century ago he painted some great pictures--like “The Persistence of Memory,” with its exquisite melting watches and dreamy vistas--but by the time it was all over, he had allowed his sharply focused gifts to sink into self-parody in anything that would sell, from kitschy glass baubles to huge editions of prints.

In the Paris of the 1920s, he was the young crown prince of the Surrealists with his Errol Flynn good looks and flair for the theatrical, but the priests of the movement excommunicated him for heresy. When Andre Breton announced Surrealists were Communists, Dali said he was a royalist. When they said money was Freudian dreck, Dali opted for luxury.

For decades the righteous of the art world used Dali as a symbol of the artistic sellout, but he lived such a long time that his posturing started to take on another meaning. He became a sort of poignant Old-World Liberace.

For two weeks before he died, the Spanish television stations broadcast fuzzy images of his ravaged face with a tube coming out of his nose. He looked confused and frightened of death. Even the ridiculous mustache was still in place. The appeal in those bulging, be-bagged eyes seemed to beg for just one more chance to make himself clear.

That clarification is not an easy matter. Most artists, even very great artists, have careers that will submit to a formula that says: “Well, he made a certain contribution with his invention of such-and-such a style. After that he refined and expanded his work until he passed away, gray and heavy with honors.”

If we submit Dali to that mold, he was pretty well washed up by the 1930s. Yet we can’t quite stop thinking about him. We can’t quite get rid of the word Dali-esque , even in the art world that so profoundly rejected him.

We think, for example, of Andy Warhol, who in the 1960s became an artist frankly interested in the kind of celebrity that is bigger than the artistic subculture. We think of Warhol’s interest in film, rock music, popular glamour and making money. There was a certain kind of originality ascribed to all of that, but it is impossible to account for it without admitting it was somewhat Dali-esque.

We recall Dali way back doing works in the show windows of a New York department store, his collaboration with Luis Bunel on the film “The Andalusian Dog.” His work at Disney studios produced little direct result, but there is no denying there is something Dali-esque about “Fantasia.” There is something Dali-esque about performance art.

Dali’s most serious theoretical contribution was called Paranoid Criticism. It simply means that the viewer trusts his craziest free associations in front of any visual image. Dali looked at a nude and saw her as a dresser with breast-shaped drawers that pull out. He looked at a giraffe and saw its mane on fire. He had the courage to paint such images, and we recognize an odd truth in them as if we had had the same nightmares.

Dali was scorned as a manipulator of Surrealist cliches, but he invented those cliches and that’s not easy. Dali was a popularizer. There is scarcely a serious art buff who does not owe one to Dali for opening an early door into the magic of vision. But by the time you understood Matisse it seemed necessary to hold Dali in contempt, ungrateful in embarrassment at one’s own past.

Dali became a remarkably enduring pop culture icon. He invented popular Surrealism. He is there in every music video where a sleek car turns into a panther and the panther turns into a beautiful dark lady.

Salvador Dali left behind an embarrassing amount of bad art. But when you take a wider focus, he played a bigger role. In the flickering stage lights of the world’s vanity, he was the provincial king whose arrogance made him a fool and the court jester whose folly made him wise.