Welcome to One Fine Show, where the Observer highlights an exhibition that recently opened at a museum outside of New York City, a place we know and love that’s already getting a lot of attention.
This year marks the 100th anniversary of André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto and the birth of the movement itself. It also saw Leonora Carrington’s Les Distractions de Dagobert (1945) sold for $28.5 million at a major spring auction in New York. Couple all this with the renewed popularity of Sigmund Freud and the current presidential election, and you can make the case that our times are beyond those in which the manifesto began.
Riding that wave at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, is “Dalí: Disruption and Devotion,” a Salvador Dalí exhibition that seeks to take the artist out of the serious context of the movement and place him in the context of wider art history. . The exhibition features nearly thirty paintings and works on paper on loan from the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, as well as books and prints from a private collection, all paired with works from the MFA’s European collection to show the influence of artists such as Diego Velázquez, El Greco and Francisco Goya on Dalí’s work.
I was surprised to hear about Dalí’s Cubist period at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía recently, not only because the style was uneven but because the artist never seemed to be one for trends. Placing him in a wider painting framework makes more sense and allows you to appreciate him beyond the conceptual level. Technically, Dalí was not on the level of René Magritte or Max Ernst, but he still deserves to be admired—we don’t just like that clocks melt, we enjoy how they melt.
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Dalí greatly admired Velázquez, a former court painter who was one of his predecessors in the shop community. This exhibition presents the artist’s latest high-concept pieces Velázquez Paints Infanta Margarita in the Lights and Shadows of Her Glory (1958) and the first, Infanta Maria Theresa (1653). In his version, Dalí covered the future wife of Louis XIV in moving darkness and razors of light that felt like they were borrowed. Blade Runner. There is, too, the silhouette of a small man, though one doubts whether Dalí thought of himself or Velázquez as anything less than ideal.
Also on display are four Dalí reinterpretations of Goya Los Caprichos prints, add color and a cartoon feel and continue the same, abstract poetry of the subjects. Goya He can’t get her out like this (1799) shows a man with a monocle inspecting a maja while onlookers seem amused. Dalí’s definition, He tortures them like this (1973-1977), he added a sickly pink look to the people and a yellow landscape that seemed to increase the distortion.
But Dalí is at his best when he’s at his best, and that name perfectly describes his ten-foot-tall stature. Council of Religion (1960): a tribute to all the religious paintings in existence, with the artist himself in the corner in the style of Bob Ross, painting a blank canvas. It’s impossible not to see the prediction of text-to-image AI in its pastiche blur. It takes a lot of creativity to do this crazy thing.
“Dalí: Disruption and Devotion” is on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, until December 1.
