Salvador Dali was the last of the great cultural outlaws, and probably the last genius to visit our cheap and gaudy planet. Look around you with an unbiased eye and, alas, you will see no painter of genius, and no novelist, poet, philosopher or composer who takes his or her place in that top tier without asking our permission. I think Dali was the greatest painter of the 20th century — far more important than Picasso, who was a 19th-century painter most at home in his studio, with the familiar props of guitars, jugs of wine and stoical girlfriends who must have wondered what was going on in his self-enclosed mind. Picasso was driven around Cannes in his American car, but he seems to have seen nothing of the world on the far side of the windscreen.
With Dali, we have the immediate sense that he not only saw the increasingly sinister world of the 1930s in all its lurid truth, but fully grasped the deranged unconscious forces that propelled Hitler and Stalin into the daylight. His paintings are like stills from an elegant newsreel filmed inside our heads, and we could reconstitute the whole of the last century from them, all its voyeurism, barbarism, scientific genius and self-disgust.
Dali's masterpiece and, I believe, the greatest painting of the 20th century is The Persistence of Memory, a tiny painting not much larger than the postcard version, containing the age of Freud, Kafka and Einstein in its image of soft watches, an embryo and a beach of fused sand. The ghost of Freud presides over the uterine fantasies that set the stage for the adult traumas to come, while insects incarnate the self-loathing of Kafka's Metamorphosis and its hero turned into a beetle.
The soft watches belong to a realm where clock time is no longer valid and relativity rules in Einstein's self-warping continuum.
What monster would grow from this sleeping embryo? It may be the long eyelashes, but there is something feminine and almost coquettish about this little figure, and I see the painting as the 20th century's Mona Lisa, a psychoanalytic take on the mysterious Gioconda smile. If the Mona Lisa, as someone said, looks as if she has just dined on her husband, then Dali's embryo looks as if she dreams of feasting on her mother.
How do we explain the huge popularity of this painting, and all of Dali's work? Suddenly, surrealism is everywhere, in those citadels of respectability such as the Tate, the V&A and the Hayward galleries in London. Put on a surrealism show and the crowds flock, quietly absorbing these strange and irrational images. It's as if people realize that reason and rationality no longer provide an adequate explanation for the world we live in. The lights may still be on, but a new Dark Age is drawing us towards its shadows, and we turn to the surrealists as our best guides to the underworld.
The 20th century was a vast textbook of psychopathology, but it took the surrealists a long time to be accepted. In the 50s, when I was hunting for illustrations of the latest Dali or Magritte, I was more likely to find them in the Daily Mirror or Daily Express, held up as objects of ridicule. Surrealism as a whole remained beyond the critical pale until well into the 1960s, and most of its great painters — Max Ernst, Magritte, Paul Delvaux — had to wait until their last years before they were accepted by the bowler- hatted bureaucrats of British art. They died loaded with honors, prizes and, worst of all, respectability.
RSS