Salvador Dali is one of the most popular artists of the 20th century, so no doubt many people who hear that a Dali show has opened at the Metropolitan Museum will expect nothing less than a full-dress retrospective.
Fortunately, they will be disappointed. There is no sign here of the Dali of the last half-century (he died in 1989), when he so assiduously cultivated notoriety and fortune that his erstwhile Surrealist colleague Andre Breton famously rearranged the letters of his name to become Avida Dollars. Nor is this a show about the Dali whose work, increasingly a recycling of his youthful ideas, became more and more a matter of merchandising. And neither is it about the aging prankster who was said to have signed thousands of blank sheets of paper, later turned into factory-produced lithographs, that flooded the market and fueled the bitterness surrounding his already plummeting reputation.
Instead, this is an exhibition about the least-known Dali, the one who emerged as a talented, narcissistic and coddled boy from the small coastal village of Figueras, in northern Spain, where he was born in 1904, to become, by the early 1930's, one of the pioneers of Surrealism. The show is about his work as a teen-ager and young man. It leads up to and includes the paintings that first secured his place in modern art, but it goes no further. Among these is "The Persistence of Memory" (1931), whose image of a watch melting, as Dali once said, like overripe Camembert, remains one of the century's most indelible.
Along the way there, Dali devoured what he saw by other artists, from Zurbaran to Goya, from Bocklin to Derain, from the Dadaists to de Chirico to Carra to Miro to Ernst to Ozenfant to Picasso -- Picasso above all. So it emerges from what is on view in this exhibition: in rapid-fire succession and sometimes simultaneously, the young Dali produced pastiches in the style of each of these artistic forebears, to the confusion and outrage of his critics.
This wasn't just a provocative feat of mimicry, although it was that. Nor was it just a sign of indecision, although it was that, too. But it also seems to have been a studied pose, an approach that regarded style as essentially changeable and as an affectation, like the dandyish suits he liked to wear or the fancy walking sticks he carried or his extravagant mustache.
In this respect, not to say in his subsequent blurring of the lines between commerce and art, between original and factory-made simulacrum, between life and art, Dali was a proto-post-modernist. Long before Jeff Koons was born, he was trying to get his name onto the equivalent of Page Six of The New York Post, constantly testing decorum with his antics.
He was just beginning to do that in the work on view at the Metropolitan, and in ways that can still look fresh some 70 years later. To be sure, much of what is displayed (more than 170 paintings, drawings, letters, postcards, manuscripts, photographs and other documents) is juvenilia of solely academic interest. But there are also landmarks like "Un Chien Andalou," the great, groundbreaking 17-minute Surrealist film of 1929 that was a collaboration between Dali and Luis Bunuel. Clips from it, including the classic of a razor slicing an eyeball, are in the exhibition, and the whole thing can be seen once a day in the museum's downstairs auditorium. (Their other film, which caused a riot at its premiere, "L'Age d'or," will be shown for a week in August.)
It is fitting, considering Bunuel's importance to the young Dali, that a monumentalizing and stonily handsome 1924 portrait of him, somewhat akin in style to Miro's earlier "Portrait of a Spanish Dancer," is one of the most striking works in the exhibition. (Also on view is the photograph of Bunuel standing beside the portrait, a quotidian man compared to the one Dali heroicized.)
The story of early Dali is the story of the poet Federico Garcia Lorca, too. Dali and Garcia Lorca were intensely close for a time, so much so that Dali eventually felt the need to put distance between them. But they remained friends until Garcia Lorca's death in 1936, during the Spanish Civil War, at the hands of a firing squad. Garcia Lorca's impassioned ode to Dali, written in 1926, contained lines like: "I sing your astronomical and tender heart like a French deck of cards and without a wound." Roots of Dali's anarchic sensibility clearly come from the example of Garcia Lorca, and Garcia Lorca's lyrical, phantasmagorical language.
This show has come to the Met from the Hayward Gallery in London, where it was a little smaller and on the whole less impressive. Here it's more grandly and lucidly displayed. The addition of several works makes a difference -- not only "The Persistence of Memory" from the Museum of Modern Art, but also the beautiful, precise and luminous "Girl's Back" (1926), the Cubistic "Homage to Erik Satie" (1926), the "Study for 'Honey Is Sweeter Than Blood' " (1927), "Rotting Donkey" (1928) and "Illumined Pleasures" (1929), also from the Modern. Important works like "The Great Masturbator" are not here. But the few additions help to close the exhibition with a bang rather than a tease. More clearly than in London, one can see where Dali went, not just where he came from.
He was a spoiled brat, born into a politically and intellectually progressive family that indulged his early infatuation with art, although his father wanted for him a secure career as an academic painter and encouraged him when he decided to go to the Academia de San Fernando in Madrid. (He was kicked out after refusing to take an exam, saying his examiners were incompetent to give it to him.)
Dali's portrait of his father from 1920 depicts a Balzacian figure in a black suit with a watch fob, a stolid colossus pictured against the heated orange beachscape of the bay at Cadaques, where the Dalis summered. Dali depicts himself, by contrast, as Mephistopheles with a pipe, his profile shrouded by a broad brimmed hat, theatrically gaunt and sallow except for the orange and yellow streaks along the cheekbones and nose.
"At the age of 7 I wanted to be Napoleon," Dali once said. "And my ambition has been growing ever since." He began to make a myth of himself early on. He invented his own unmistakable caricature: a dome of hair, two arched eyebrows, two oval eyes and a long line for the nose.
It took him a while to find a mode of painting that was equally unmistakable. He was eerily chameleonlike, in fact, metamorphosing into one after another artistic guise, a feat that depended on manual dexterity, not to say a chilling sense of careerist calculation.
He evokes Seurat in one drawing; in another, of the composer Manuel de Falla, it is line drawings by Picasso, like the one he did of Stravinsky, that come to mind. The influence of Picasso, if you can call shameless imitation influence, is everywhere to be seen in the exhibition.
Clearly he looked, as well, to German art, past and present, and to Dutch masters like Vermeer and Dou, whose enameled surfaces he eventually adapted, without their precision, to Surrealist ends. (The show includes a copy of a Vermeer by him, from the 1950's, which belongs to the Met.) Striking works like "Seated Girl Seen From the Back" seem to look to Friedrich, while some of his drawings of Madrid night life in the early 20's suggest an affinity for the German Neue Sachlichkeit artists of his own generation, like Grosz.
From Goya it looks as if he cribbed images of flying witches and barren trees hung with dismembered bodies (turned into melting watches). He learned from de Chirico and Magritte the evocative devices of vast planes, like salt flats, receding endlessly into space, and of empty colonnades and pedestals.
He finally distilled all these sources and gave to them an original and acutely intense note in mature works like "Invisible Man" (1929-32). With its hidden face, its ghoulish scenarios and ripe sexuality, it combines much of what defined the mature Dali.
Metamorphosis itself eventually became a trope for him, the metamorphosis of solids into flaccid forms, of rock faces into human faces. His lurid imagination turned out to be filled also with recurring dreams and nightmares of half-submerged bodies, double images, decapitated heads, giant phalluses, twittering forms, rotting donkeys, swarming ants and landscapes illuminated by a hard, slanting light, like the one that he cast across the rocky surface of "Cliffs" and the similar rocks in "Persistence of Memory."
Making Surrealism accessible to a wide public, which he began to do with works like the ones here from the late 20's and the 30's, was perhaps his ultimate contribution. This was no small accomplishment, and it came to seem dubious only because Dali turned himself into such a public spectacle in the end. Despite that, the value of the early works cannot be denied.
"Dali: The Early Years," remains at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fifth Avenue at 82d Street, through Sept. 18. It travels to Madrid in October and to Barcelona in February 1995.
