I have like most people a love/hate relationship with Salvadore Dali. He can astound with both his ability to create some of the most accomplished masterpieces of modernism and at the same time produce some of its most cheezy rubbish.
To my delight and dismay and thereby reinforcing my view of the eccentric Spaniard, this compilation at Tate Modern provides us with both.
While Dali’s work certainly grabs your imagination, -yesterday was my fourth visit to the show, which testifies to the extraordinary feelings of facination and frustration his work can invoke, the show itself fails to deliver.
The exhibition aims to show he was immersed in the cinema and worked on numerous film projects, how it became one of the media in which he tested and explored the distinctive imagery and ideas of his paintings, and how a lifetime of cinema-going infused his paintings. Unfortunately there is little information given on the films of his lifetime to see any connection with the direction of his painting, and apart from his well documented collaboration with Bunuel on ‘Un Chien Andalou’ & ‘L’Age d’or’ & the cellebrated dream sequence in Hitchcock’s ‘Spellbound’ of 1945 there seems little of cinematic interest.
It is the quality of the paintings on show that has provided me with the urge to revisit the exhibition so many times – with ‘Sleep’ of 1937 demanding my constant attention. This image alone is worth the visit, combining elements of natural reality and imaginative metaphor in a timeless peacefull landscape Dali has captured the essence of his time and state of being. The large limp head propped up by numerous spindly crutches like a partially deflated barrage balloon coming to rest and carrying the weight of an age on its mind, yet still managing to find peace in the partially deserted landscape of Dali’s Spain.
My feelings for Dali’s links with the film world are best illustrated by his painting of Jack Warner and his dog. I assume that Dali planned to use this painting as an application for work in Disney’s animation studios, if you look very closely you can almost see the cheese oozing out of the corner of Jack’s mouth.
Luckily there are a few more good paintings on view to make this a better than average exhibition with ‘The persistence of memory’ 1931 & the Tate’s own ‘Autumn cannibalism’ 1936 among the best.
Dali & Film continues at Tate Modern until 9th September 2007