Dennis Hollingsworth

Museo Dali

I've just finished a painting and my mom and aunt (Beng) will be concluding their visit next week and our friends Joel and Tif will be arriving soon, and Ramon had just delivered the next panels (plus the initial parts of the door for the fourth floor), and I have yet to see the Dali museum in Figueres, and mom has a rental car burning a hole n her pocket anyway....

It was time for an afternoon Catalonian road trip!

While I have always respected Salvador Dali, I've always thought that whatever was good about his work was overshadowed by the taint of overpopularization... or schlock.

I remember seeing Dali's Last Supper at the National Gallery in Washington D.C. many, many moons ago. His technique is mezmerizing, built as it was from intensively conventional representational techniques... a kind of tech that erased its' own mechanics.

(BlogPost Interruptus, sorry about that! Joel and Tif arrived and it's been nonstop highjinks ever since. Let's see, where was I?)

Oh yea, After finishing the last painting we went to the Dali museum in Figures for a looksee. I've avoided the museum for many years because of his chequered reputation and multiple reports that the museum itself was nothing special. Before the withering summation, the good stuff: Figueres had taken on the Dali legacy and theme parked it (oops, sorry to slip back into critique), and they enshrined the museum in the urban heart of the town. Narrow streets, courtyards, gardens, shopping and restaurants and all very well taken care of. The egg topped, bread decorated building commands an elegant authority as the surrealist king urbanistically, it does look good there.

Umm, that's about it. It's a theme park nonetheless, no different from Disneyland, Vegas' Golden Nugget or a Lloret disco for that matter (or worse, Gnomo Park, near here).

Dali's work is best in his early meticulous hyperrealism paintings, many no larger than the palm of your hand. They have the classics: Gala with her back turned, Salvador's still life of bread, stuff like that. There are also many of his early hack jobs painted when he was a pup in the early twenties in Paris: bad cubism, bad whateveritwas-ism. I become aware of my earlier assertion that once someone accomplishes something great, the author should get special dispensation for hack jobs done before and after... like Coppola for example. I guess Dali would now be the exception.

My first response was to think that this must be the patient zero of all the terrible assemblage work done by students in grad school for the past several decades: take someting, glue it onto something else, ponder the metaphysical ramifications... failing that, glue something else, repeat. Schlock. There were so many terrible pieces there that one gets the impression that Dali's reputation was not here well served. Swome artists would think that once they did something remarkable, everything else touched in their life has the mark of genius... even the mearest smear of it . Sam Francis, for example. That guy never edited himself, everything he touched was signed, catalogued and archived in an unbroken stream of life-production. Too bad for him that he did so, it didn't serve him well.

There is also the thought of the legacy of the Pop artist and the mercantile address of their work. Evidently, before Kieth Haring and later Murakame (and Jorge Pardo for that matter) annointed themselves the hiers of Warhol's factory and Oldenburg's "store", there was Dali's exploitation of the multiple print business. Eye catching images, mass produced at various pricepoints, controlled for maximum profit.

Dreadful.

But what was a surprise was Dali's personal collection, which was mixed into his. Here lies Duchamp's "La Mallete", under glass. Unfortunately, all the work in this museum is fraying and generally is not well taken care of. In Marcel's case, the piece is delaminating here and there, disheveled.

And above hung an actual Greco. Amazing.