The Comedian & the Straight Man

Back in the 1930s, surrealism was hot news, with its limp watches, ovarian vegetables and chance encounters between sewing machines and umbrellas on dissecting tables. Last week, in what amounted to an unexpected revival, two practitioners of that sleight of art were back on the boards in Manhat tan, looking for all the world like the ghost of Christmas Past.

Behind the Curtain. At Huntington Hartford's Gallery of Modern Art, the show was all Salvador Dali. To please his favorite contemporary artist, Hartford has filled his museum from top to bottom with 375 items of Dali's hitand-miss genius. But it was Dali himself who won best-of-show at a gala black-tie lecture attended by critics, socialites and an ocelot on a leash. Sporting his silver-handled cane, Dali held the audience in breathless amusement as he dashed off a sketch of a horseman to the tempo of world-renowned Guitarist Manitas de Plata and his flamen co-booted partner--while a museum aide scampered back and forth across the stage to keep Dali in drawing pens.

Not that Dali had skimped on art for the occasion. On view were his latest works, featuring a spatterdash Homage to Meissonier, which most certainly would not please Meissonier, a 19th century French academic who painted romances of gladiators and Napoleonic battles. Also from 1965's crop: Salvador Dali in the Act of Painting Gala in the Apotheosis of the Dollar in Which You Can See on the Left Marcel Duchamp Masquerading as Louis XIV Behind a Vermeerian Cur tain Which Actually Is the Invisible Face but Monumental of Hermes by Praxiteles. It covers quite a bit of art history in a style that describes Dali himself--a pastiche.

Illogical Logic. At the Museum of Modern Art, it was Old Line Surrealist Rene Magritte's turn, and the exhibition of 82 paintings proved that the Belgian-born artist has lost none of his wizardry. Loaves of bread fly in formation beyond a stone embrasure in The Golden Legend; an immense rock floats weightless in The Glass Key; in Blank Signature, a fine lady upon a chestnut horse rides mysteriously through an enchanted forest, passing before and beyond a landscape painted magically as if on a vertical Venetian blind.

Magritte, 67, who made his first visit to New York for the opening along with his wife Georgette and his dog Lou-Lou, succeeded as the perfect straight man of surrealism. "The thought expressed in my work is absolute," he said. "It can't be interpreted. In my painting, a bird is a bird. And a bottle is a bottle, not a symbol of a womb." All of which inspired critics to find his work an antecedent of pop art. The painting is so meticulous, the objects themselves so ordinary yet so extraordinarily juxtaposed that Magritte obviously means to convey an apparently clear vision in which the illogical becomes magically super-logical.

Magritte fails, not because it is difficult to follow his dream logic--it is quite conceivable that sometime it might start raining men in derby hats. Magritte's divorce from reality is sensuous enough to appeal to sensibility, but his carefully rendered iconography is so personal that it suggests only a visible world in which no one ever lived. These images are deliberately insoluble puzzles, meticulously worked-out scenarios of subtle shock calculated to spur the unconscious. But contemporary man finds enough anxiety in the very air that he breathes and more challenging puzzles in the streets that he walks --in the direct apprehension of reality.

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