Baby Dali

By ROBERT HUGHES

Was any painter a worse embarrassment than Salvador Dali? Not even Andy Warhol. Long before his physical death in 1989, old Avida Dollars -- Andre Breton's anagram of his name -- had collapsed into wretched exhibitionism. Genius, Shocker, Lip-Topiarist: though he once turned down an American businessman's proposal to open a string of what would be called Dalicatessens, there was little else he refused to endorse, from chocolates to perfumes. He was surrounded by fakes and crooks and married to one of the greediest harpies in Europe: Gala, who made him the indentured servant of his lost talent even / as he treated her as his muse.

Nevertheless, Dali was an important artist for about 10 years, starting in the late 1920s. Nothing can take that away from him. Other Surrealists -- especially Max Ernst and Dali's fellow Catalan Joan Miro -- were greater magicians; but Dali's sharp, glaring, enameled visions of death, sexual failure and deliquescence, of displaced religious mania and creepy organic delight, left an ineradicable mark on our century when it, and he, were young. Dali turned "retrograde" technique -- the kind of dazzlingly detailed illusionism that made irreality concrete, as in The First Days of Spring, 1929 -- toward subversive ends. His soft watches will never cease to tick, not as long as the world has adolescent dandies and boy rebels in it.

But what of Dali's own clockwork? What wound him up? This is the theme of "Salvador Dali: The Early Years," an exhibition opening this week at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art. The curators, Ana Beristain and Dawn Ades, have brought together a mass of Dali's juvenilia, starting at age 12; the show ends in 1929, with Dali in Paris, moving through storms of controversy, the 25-year-old darling of both Left and Right Banks. By rights this show ought to contain the "classics" of Dali's early achievement -- paintings from 1929 like The Lugubrious Game and The Great Masturbator. But these could not be borrowed, and so the early Dali story loses much of its climax.

Surrealism was fascinated by childhood, viewing it as the primal forest of the imagination -- the place where all the id's most succulent and aggressive life-forms ran rampant, before civilization paved them over. Hence you could suppose that Dali's own childhood would be rich in suggestion about his mature work. And so it was, in a way; but not the way he meant it to be.

In his mythomaniac autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, he took pains to spin out a fiction of his early originality. He wanted people to think he'd been found like Moses in the bulrushes, a miracle child: Salvador, Saviour. In part this did correspond to the truth. As Ian Gibson's fascinating catalog essay on Dali's early life makes clear, little Salvador was a horribly spoiled brat. Cosseted, deferred to, aware that a tantrum could get him anything he wanted, he grew up with serious delusions of creative omnipotence -- which, as time went by, coexisted with equally serious problems of sexual impotence, caused (or so he said) by a book with lurid illustrations of the effects of venereal disease that his father had shown him. Dali turned out to be the exact opposite of Picasso's phallicism. He was thrilled by softness, flaccidity. "Nothing," he wrote, "can be regarded as too slimy, gelatinous, quivering, indeterminate or ignominious to be desired."

In art, the fledgling Dali believed he could do anything -- including what other artists had done, which became "Dalinian" by virtue of being redone by him. The exhibition shows him running through the styles, with slowly increasing calculation, trying them on for fit. He was a 15-year-old Impressionist and then a 16-year-old Symbolist, painting his grandmother sewing in a foggy all-blue room; this veiled figure is the first of the Sibylline crones who would keep turning up in his later work. He does Fauve blotches -- Mediterranean with measles, after Matisse and Derain -- and combines them with elements of the classicizing movement which, in Catalunya, was known as noucentisme (20th century-ism), with "timeless" peasant figures, olive trees and old arches.

He paints himself as a phosphorescent dandy with a giant hat, and his father as a massive totem against the overheated landscape of Cadaques. This, one realizes, is the first painting by Dali that actually means something, that opens the Pandora's box of obsession of his later, Surrealist work. What it means is parricide. He sees his father as a dark colossus, a parody of the figures of patriarchy that bulked so large in Catalan folklore. Much of his work thereafter would be devoted to dragging the paternal giant from his pedestal.

Dali went to art school in Madrid in the early 1920s. "I'll be a genius," he wrote in his diary two years before that. "Perhaps I'll be despised and misunderstood, but I'll be a genius, a great genius." Cold and diligent, he figured out all his poses and provocations in advance. Politically, too, he wanted to be shocking; later Dali would turn into an archconservative, the living national treasure of Franco's long regime, but in the 1920s -- the years of Primo de Rivera's dictatorship -- he was a vehement parlor red. He even did jail time, briefly, when he was arrested as a reprisal against his father's left-wing political activity.

There was, however, nothing particularly revolutionary about his paintings. Seeking a credible genius costume, he did versions of Cubism, of De Chirico's pittura metafisica, and developed his dry, classicizing realism in such images as Seated Girl Seen from the Back, 1925. It is an easy matter to go through this early work identifying, here and there, what would grow and what would not: how the taste for smoothly curved profile and deep black relief that he got from Amedee Ozenfant's decorative Cubism, for instance, turned into Dali's later fondness for writhing, spookily dark shadows cast by figures on a flat ground-plane, the idealized desert of his paintings. Dali's obsession with Picasso reached a height of imitative flattery with his pastiches of the older painter's massive "classical" women in white fluted dresses. Likewise, when Dali the Surrealist was pupating, there was hardly a trope in his pictures of 1927-28 that didn't come out of Andre Masson, Ernst, Miro or Yves Tanguy.

But his originality as an artist began with his peculiar experiences of the natural world, such as the contorted rocks at Cape Creus, near his boyhood home, sculpted into fantastically ambiguous shapes by tide and weather; like faces seen in the fire, these were the foundation stones of what Dali called his "paranoiac-critical method" of seeking dream images. Dali's art may not tap far into his unconscious, but it reveals a great deal about what he imagined his unconscious to be.

Perhaps the most important imaginative relationships in young Dali's life were with people, not paintings: the poet Federico Garcia Lorca and the future filmmaker Luis Bunuel. United in their loathing of bourgeois convention -- Dali and Lorca coined the term putrefact for any stale idea or piece of kitsch that offended their nostrils -- the three were, in fact, very different creatures. Bunuel never lost his anarchic iconoclasm, whereas middle age ended Dali's; but the films they made together (An Andalusian Dog, 1929, and The Golden Age, 1930) remain classics of provocation. For a few years, Lorca and Dali found themselves in a trance of mutually reinforcing narcissism. "The poetic phenomenon in its entirety and 'in the raw,' " Dali wrote of Lorca, "presented itself before me suddenly in flesh and bone, confused, blood- red, viscous and sublime." This was understatement compared with the fervid sexual passion Lorca felt for Dali. Dali, who fanatically denied his own homosexual urges, did not respond to Lorca's passes -- though, he characteristically remarked, "I was very flattered from the point of view of my own prestige."

The crystalline and extravagant beauty of Lorca's imagery helped release similar qualities in Dali's work; above all, it was the poet's baroque character, his preoccupation with death, sex and the morbidity of flesh, that encouraged the younger artist's imagination. The mark Lorca left on Dali's art was not its modernity but its extreme Spanishness. But that, too, is why Dali's best work has lasted.