28/7/07 (Dali at the Tate)

Re Dali; the crucial development he made in Surrealist painting was the literalisation – that is, the rendering realist and photographic – of its hitherto semi-abstract forms, the introduction of three-dimensional, illusionist pictorial space into the flat spaces of, say, a Miro. Consider the transition from the early ‘Cubist’ and beach and bather scenes to the ‘properly’ Surrealist works of the late twenties and thirties. This introduction of ‘conventional’ pictorial space brings with it metaphor: something neither Cubism nor pure abstraction were capable of – or intended to – generate. And metaphor, of course, belonged to the terrain of the subconscious. Compare Dali’s literalisation of ‘abstract’ forms with Donne’s literalisation of poetic metaphor, which set the preconditions for ‘metaphysical poetry’. Donne’s method, too, involved a commitment to precision and clarity. Both could be interpreted as a kind of petrification or ossification of form. And both, of course, implied a reactionary aesthetics (I think it is safe to say) which comprised an earlier, ‘good’ phase (the twenties and thirties, the Songs and Sonnets), and a later degenerated one (the ‘Hollywood’ period, the religious poetry).

The exhibition is interesting in revealing how early the connection with Hollywood, and mass culture in general, came; as well as Dali’s clear ambitions in this area. But it is also clear that Dali’s later career was an overt and extravagant selling out, a long, and apparently gleeful, prostitution of the methods worked out in its earlier phase. The paintings, this time, seemed less than successful: you admired them from afar. It was Un Chien Andalou and L’Age d’Or that stood out; those, and a few of this collage letters.