Method to his madness

The single greatest work made during the long career of the histrionic Spanish artist Salvador Dali (1904-1989) hangs just past the halfway mark in the enormous centennial retrospective of nearly 200 paintings, drawings and Surrealist objects that opened here last month. That picture is not “The Persistence of Memory” (1931), the admittedly fine, jewel-like little painting of soft watches hanging limply in a desolate landscape by the sea. The Museum of Modern Art in New York, which owns the famous canvas, refused to lend it for this, the largest overview of Dali’s work ever in the United States.

Instead, “Soft Construction With Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War)” is a ferocious image that lays out Dali’s relentlessly bleak view of human nature. Painted five years after “The Persistence of Memory,” the work is owned by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, whose curator,

Michael R. Taylor, collaborated on the retrospective with independent curator and Dali specialist Dawn Ades, working for the Palazzo Grassi in Venice, Italy. With Goya as historical ballast and the lively experimentation of the Parisian avant-garde as its engine, the painting ranks as a Surrealist icon.

Slightly more than 3 feet square, it shows a colossal human figure that seems to have torn itself limb from limb. Assorted body parts, grotesquely muscular or grimly emaciated, are reassembled into a jagged construction that pulls to the left and yanks to the right, like a starving man tearing apart a roasted chicken. A human scaffold, stabilized at the base by a filing cabinet or chest of drawers, the figure tosses back a head whose mouth is locked between a grimace and a grin.

A rugged brown landscape spreads out across the bottom. The horizon line is low, so the monstrous figure seems that much more imposing. Likewise the clouds tinged with bilious green and smoky rust, which streak and billow in the azure sky. A rocky cliff at the right seems to double as the mocking face of a baboon, while the partial torso of a reclining female nude, deathly gray, appears to sink as if into quicksand. White beans are scattered about -- the necessary side dish to a Catalan feast of meaty flesh.

Dali’s chopped-up figure forms a looming monument that could occupy the town square of modern consciousness. But unlike that other masterpiece linked to the catastrophe of Spain’s civil war -- Picasso’s “Guernica” -- this one is no grippingly designed, sentimental acknowledgment of suffering and atrocity. Dali’s painting, neither a shriek of protest against fascist barbarism nor a rallying cry of resistance, pictures something more fundamentally disturbing. Ancient in its imagery and futuristic in its style, it’s a stinging refusal of Modernist dreams of progress. The grim so-called premonition of war could be subtitled, “So, What Else Is New?”

The skewed, square outline of the monstrous figure recalls a map of the Iberian Peninsula, which, like most pieces of worldly real estate, has been drawn from centuries of monstrousness. The ogre-cum-map is also typical of Dali’s principal artistic contribution to the Surrealist movement. He named this pictorial device, with characteristic grandiosity, the “paranoiac-critical method.”

Translation: One object could signify another. A single shape could be perceived as more than one image. Delusion would result.

Carefully executed, a realist technique would make this double image -- or sometimes triple, quadruple or even quintuple image -- seem at once mysterious and tangible, fantastic yet authentic, impossible but true. An apparition was made flesh.

The public, increasingly alienated from Modern abstract art, grew to love Dali’s hyperrealist technique. Looking at a geometric grid by Mondrian or an expanse of colorful squiggles by Miro and seeing nothing but a grid and squiggles, the uninitiated could look into a paranoiac-critical painting by Dali and see plenty. The fruit dish is a dog is a portrait is a landscape of the beach!

The technique was not entirely new, having been popular in medieval manuscript borders and the 16th century portraits of Giuseppe Arcimboldo, built from fruits and vegetables. But the paranoiac-critical method had a newer pedigree: Sigmund Freud’s belief that dreams were a symbolic literary expression of unconscious desire.

Dali rummaged around in his own past for examples -- especially ones with a Catholic twist, so that his technical skill as a Realist painter could conjure an aesthetic equivalent to “the incarnate word.” One was the supposed similarity between the praying peasant woman in Jean Millet’s famous farm image, “The Angelus” -- a chromolithograph of which hung in the parlor of thousands of pious European households (including Dali’s) early in the 20th century -- and the shape of a female praying mantis. That notorious bug devours its mate following sex, giving a certain carnal spin to what might happen when Mr. and Mrs. Pious Peasant get back to the hovel after twilight prayers.

Pretty funny. The Philadelphia show includes several versions of this goofball theme. One even graces the cover of the mammoth, 2-inch-thick catalog.

Artistically speaking, however, the paranoiac-critical method is also pretty thin. The formal idea of a multiple image evolved from the radical breakthrough of Cubist painting, in which several viewpoints of a single object exist simultaneously. Conceptually, it was the next small step from Dada -- especially Marcel Duchamp, for whom an ordinary store-bought snow shovel could double as a sculpture, if the context was right.

The revolutionary artistic developments of Cubism and Dada occurred in the 1910s, when Dali was still in short pants, while Freudian dream analysis was even older. But the painter’s signature work dates from the 1930s. There is such a thing as an avant-garde establishment, and Dali epitomizes it.

The scientific sounding paranoiac-critical method may have been Dali’s main contribution to Surrealism, but that fact also indicates just how meager a talent he was. His art is profoundly conservative, despite its ostensible outrageousness, and largely of interest for helping popularize the otherwise arcane world of Freudian psychology.

Exceptionally precocious (the show’s earliest works, some of them juvenilia, include finely rendered pencil portraits of family and friends), Dali was ambitious too. Before he was 21 he was absorbing every modern “ism” to come down the pike since 1875 -- Impressionism, Primitivism, Divisionism, Cubism, Futurism, Metaphysical painting and more -- often gleaned from the Parisian art magazines his bookseller uncle gave him.

A veritable magpie, he soon outpaced his conventional teachers at the art academy in Madrid. Dali quit, telling them they had nothing to teach him. In 1928 he went to Paris.

The decade after 1929 has long been regarded as Dali’s best. That was the year the autocratic writer Andre Breton, “the Surrealist pope,” cautiously accepted the young Spaniard into the official ranks of the movement, which he had formally launched with a manifesto five years earlier. Dali was all of 25, a hoped-for representative of continuing Surrealist generations to come. He lived to 84, but half the exhibition -- almost 100 works -- dates from just these 10 years.

Isolated in a solo retrospective, an artist can appear unique and far more inventive than he would if his work were surrounded with that of his peers. So it is with Dali. His paintings synthesize motifs and strategies from De Chirico, Tanguy, Chagall, Max Ernst, Miro, Arp and many others.

Most compellingly, they also cultivate premodern techniques, especially from Vermeer and 15th century Flemish miniaturists. The result: Impossible images (like melting watches) are photographic in their surface quality -- camera pictures no camera could ever take. His little niche of innovation might be described as Photo-Surrealism. The curators seem to think this ranks him as a singular genius of the Surrealist epoch, towering over the landscape of Modern art, rather than as the gifted but secondary figure he actually was. What’s more, they also propose that his work after the heyday of the 1930s is similarly innovative but unduly neglected -- even though they’ve assembled just 42 examples from his final 40 years.

We should be grateful for the paucity. The show’s last several rooms are loaded with junk, including the Cinemascope dazzlers he called “nuclear mysticism,” which claimed to reconcile the classic modern schism between science and religion. Several cast Jesus as a gymnast worthy of Cirque du Soleil.

Because Dali made a big 1963 painting based on a photo enlargement of his dead brother and a 1958 one of Pope John XXIII’s ear, we’re also supposed to get excited about the depth of his insight. The emphasis on enlarged Benday dots yields a superficial resemblance to concurrent Pop art by Roy Lichtenstein and later Sigmar Polke paintings; but like the nuclear mysticism, it’s just more conservative Photo-Surrealism.

Superficial -- not prescient -- is the operative term here. The catalog, after noting Dali’s unsurpassed public fame among Modern artists, enthuses: “He is also controversial. No other major 20th century artist combines such widespread popular appeal with so much critical disdain from official institutions and historians of modern art.”

You read that right. Once upon a time artists were controversial because of popular loathing; now, apparently, they’re controversial because the public adores them. Daniel Boorstin coined the term “pseudo-event” for this tabloid technique for charting consequence. He opened his celebrated 1961 book, “The Image,” with a pointed joke:

Admiring Friend: “My, that’s a beautiful baby you have there.”

Mother: “Oh, that’s nothing -- you should see his photograph!”

“Salvador Dali” is billed as revisionist art history, but actually it’s a beautiful baby picture. The show exploits the tabloid theme the artist perfected for contrived, scripted performances, designed to create a marketable image. “Revisionist” curators get to play the cliched role of rebellious artist, challenging counterfeit taboos, while mirroring Dali’s vacuous careerism.

Museums rarely allow artists to have human scale and nuanced achievements, only outsized stature as blunderbuss geniuses whose daring reassessment is way overdue. Judging from the long lines of ticket-buyers paying upwards of $20 a pop to get into this pseudo-event, controversy is good for art museum business.