The Embarrassing Genius

By ROBERT HUGHES

With some artists, death is only a ratification of decay: it releases them from the humiliations of their late careers. So it was with Salvador Dali, who when he died last week at 84 was perhaps the archetype of that 20th century phenomenon, the Embarrassing Genius. He was the first modern artist to exploit fully the mechanism of publicity. He appropriated the idea of the artist as demonic obsessive. He dealt with the question Why should your fantasies matter? by insisting that he was such an extraterrestrial creature, so tuned to the zeitgeist through the trembling antennas of his waxed mustache, that he could not be ignored. Armored in paradox, he was a household word rivaling Picasso in fame, at least in the eyes of a mass public that knew him as an eccentric first and a painter second.

Unlike Picasso, however, Dali in the last few decades of his life produced little but kitsch. The perfunctory replays of images from his inventive youth -- the burning giraffes, androgynous St. Johns of the Cross and nudes with chewing-gum hips -- were printed in tens of thousands of "rare" or limited works; this was art sleaze, surrealism pathetically embracing the ethos of the Franklin Mint. Dali's last years, surrounded by flacks and barracuda (from whom he was, to put it mildly, not protected by his wife Gala, who died in 1982), were a cautionary horror. Several years ago, when his hands had long been too shaky to draw but could still scribble, he signed ream upon ream of blank sheets that now bear forged "Dali lithographs," the pride and joy of suckers from New Jersey to Brisbane, Australia.

The early Dali was a different matter, an insecure and ravenously aggressive young dandy, wringing an uncanny poetry not only from his own neurosis but also from the psychic inflammations of Europe in the 1920s and '30s. Like his fellow Catalan Joan Miro, Dali was deep-dyed with images of place, among them the contorted rocks and flat beaches of the coast near the town of Figueras, where he grew up, and the flowing, bizarre buildings of Barcelona's master of art nouveau, Antonio Gaudi.

From his art-student days (if one is to believe The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, his charmingly mythomanic autobiography), he struck everyone, especially himself, as a prodigy. Around 1929, after moving to Paris and serving an apprenticeship in various realist and cubist styles, he saw that realism, when pressed to a photographic extreme, could subvert one's sense of reality. He therefore used what he called "tricks of eye fooling" to invoke "sublime hierarchies of thought."

His tight, enameled technique could make any vision, no matter how outrageous, seem persuasively real. It fitted the central claim of surrealism that dreams were superior facts, the incarnation of desire and possibility. But it needed a system of images, and that is what Dali found through what he called his "critical-paranoiac" method. In essence, it meant looking at one thing and seeing another -- an extended version of the face seen in the fire. Heads turn into a distant city, a landscape resolves itself as a still life, inexplicable combinations are seen to lurk magically beneath the skin of the world.

Most vintage Dali was painted before his 35th birthday in 1939. In these canvases, like the familiar The Persistence of Memory, 1931, we are looking down the wrong end of the telescope at a brilliant, clear, shrunken and poisoned world whose deep mannerist perspective and sharp patches of shadow invite the eye but not the body. One could not imagine walking on that stretched, satiny beach among the oozing watches. This atmosphere of voyeurism lent force to Dali's obsessive imagery of impotence, violence and guilt.

Even in his most extreme moments of anticlerical shock, Dali remained a Spanish Catholic. He inherited from Spanish devotional art a paralyzing morbidity about flesh. He liked anything that was not erect: running Camembert, soft watches, sagging loaves of flesh held up by crutches. Naturally all this was much more shocking 50 years ago than it is today: Dali was regularly denounced by Fascists and Stalinists alike as a decadent threat to youth. When he could no longer annoy either the bourgeoisie or the self- appointed guardians of the proletariat, he mortally offended the avant- garde by embracing Franco and the Pope, and was duly drummed out of the surrealist group for it.

Dali's reaction, natural in such an enfant terrible, was to become more royalist than the King and more ostentatiously greedy than his Palm Beach and Hollywood patrons. If the net result was a tacky, phosphorescent caricature of Genius at Work, an embarrassment to most aficionados, it is still inconceivable that Dali the bad boy will ever be expelled from the pantheon of modern imagination.