Is it because he painted William Tell, watches as limp as runny cheese, and was mad about money that Salvador Dalí has so intrigued the Swiss?
All last fall, a massive retrospective of this century's most materialistic and controversial painter drew crowds to Zurich's Kunsthaus, "We have never seen such queues," says curator Tony Stooss, who setup the exhibit. "I believe it is because he was the only modern artist who allowed himself to express everything and anything. It liberates a host of personal phantasms. His smooth classical technique fascinates people. Visitors keep on saying 'He drew so well.’"
The mammoth exhibition, which had opened first in Stuttgart, West Germany, has been arousing an enthusiasm bordering on positive delirium among art critics and public alike. Wisely the exhibit shows off to best effect the artist's great years, 1927 to 1938.
The Zurich exhibit is backed by photographs taken through out his life from a baby picture to the last photography session before his death as well as famous pictures of him by Man Ray, Philippe Halsmann, and Lacroix.
After a lifetime of outrageous posturing, publicity seeking, and mustache twirling, the 85-year old Dalí died last January with a whimper: a pathetic recluse being kept alive by a pacemaker, spattered by a scandal of fakes, some of which he had encouraged himself. The fiery-eyed young Catalan with the hungry profile had appeared on the Paris art scene with a bang when the Surrealists made him their standard-bearer over sixty years ago. The retrospective attempts to make clearer Dalí's contribution to twentieth-century art.
"We took no chances, even eliminating one painting simply because its pedigree was not impeccable." The 560-page catalog with its 313 illustrations lists oil, sketches, sculptures, dresses, jewelry, Surrealist objects, and illustrations for books, book jackets, and engravings. The works have been lent by over twenty public and private museums around the world. Private collectors from Florida to Geneva have contributed works. And the scattered collection of an early patron, Edward James, has been reunited for the show. It provides a rare chance for the Dalí amateur to immerse himself in the rich detail of the master's work, little of which shows up in the millions of fake reproductions that surface from Paris to Hawaii in Dalí's name and that are hardly worth the paper they are printed on.
The exhibit ranges from the Madrid art student's earliest work in a splendid variety of styles to the erotic Surrealist imagery, mystic visions, and imaginative experiments that have influenced contemporary art and design.
The first encounter in this neatly compartmented Zurich Dalí land is the Dream of Venus, first shown at the 1939 World's Fair in New York. Though it is said that Dalí only painted part of it and the background was filled in by art students, the panel recapitulates most of Dalí's themes - the floppy watches, the flaming giraffe, the empty, flat dream landscape of his boyhood with the rounded rock, long shadows, and distant figures. World's Fair organizers tried in vain to stop Dalí from giving the Venus a fish head, begging him to paint her with a siren's tail instead. Infuriated, Dalí dashed off his "Declaration of the Rights of Man to
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