Portrait of Dali is incomplete

I am compelled to respond to Christopher Knight’s myopic and absurdly pretentious review of Salvador Dali [“Method to his Madness,” March 19], in which the artist is called a “gifted but secondary figure” and generally dismissed as a charlatan whose talent far exceeds his depth.

Knight attempts to measure Dali using a dubious sort of Postmodern/Poststructuralist critique in the vein of someone who has just completed his midterm paper on Derrida. The result is a nearsighted portrait that does grave injustice to the artist’s work, vision and intellect. Knight fails to discuss Dali in a context beyond his development of the “paranoiac-critical method” and subsequently understates his profound impact on modern art.

Dali earns his renown as a modern master not through abstract critical interpretation, but from the striking nature of his painting. In my opinion, no artist embodies the 20th century better than Dali, and to call him “secondary” is simply unfair.

Valerie Rodriguez

Monterey