Dalí: Disruption and Devotion
Museum of Fine Arts Boston
July 6-December 1, 2024
In 1939, Salvador Dalí was expelled from the Surrealist movement and declared that he would pursue the remainder of his artistic career as a classicist. It was not long after this that he renewed the Roman Catholic faith of his childhood, and turned at least some of his attention to portraying traditional Christian subject matter over the next few decades, albeit with a distinct Surrealist taste for the visionary (or the hallucinatory), which the artist described as part of the traditional Spanish propensity for the mystical as exemplified by 16th-century poet and writer St. John of the Cross, author of Dark Night of the Soul.
Among the best known and successful of these Catholic subjects is Dalí’s Vision of Saint John of the Cross, from 1951 (now in Glasgow), for which the artist prepared a large, breathtaking red-chalk drawing that is in the current exhibition of Dalí’s work at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts (through December). The striking and unusual perspective so masterfully executed is of the crucified Christ seen from above. It is one of the best and most classical of his pieces in the exhibit, if classicism is taken to mean stylistic harmony, order, unity, and “noble simplicity,” as art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann described it in the 18th century. Most of the work in the current exhibit, however, shows no signs of classical order and restraint, but rather reflects an almost Baroque sense of exuberant (or terrifying) complexity, movement, and chaos.
As if in search of Dalí’s classicism, the exhibit brings together not only the artist’s late work (after 1939) but also pieces dating to the 1920s, along with the work of old masters of European art from the museum’s permanent collection. This includes not only Bosch and Bruegel, but also El Greco, Zurbarán, Velasquez, Vermeer, and other Dutch Baroque artists, as well as that early 19th-century master of fantasy, Francisco Goya. Although the Dalí paintings are similar to the earlier masters in their technique of oil glazing and in their attention to detail, the subject matter in these paintings, including those executed after 1939, is anything but classical. It continues his earlier Surrealist pursuit of the hallucinatory and the incongruous, executed with an obsessive miniaturist’s eye for lucidity and precision, even when he turns his attention to Christian subjects.
He famously stated his intention of creating, with a camera’s accuracy, the dreamscape of the unconscious mind, the frontiers within, so to speak, producing “hand-painted dream photographs,” as he called them. The best of these follow his idiosyncratic obsessions wherever they take him, and include cannibalism, being devoured by insects, decaying donkey carcasses, rigidity in soft materials or softness in rigid objects, crutches supporting drooping substances, and pianos or jugs morphing into faces. These same hallucinogenic qualities characterize his religious works made after his return to Catholicism, but it is difficult to interpret what they might mean in this new Christian context.
In Dalí’s figure, clearly based on Michelangelo, the left hand rises as if to shield him from being recognized by paparazzi. Dalí’s figure loses all sense of composure and balance that Jesus has in the Michelangelo, and seemingly becomes a neurotic overcome with grief or shame who cannot even bear to look at the viewer. In fact, the face of Christ is usually not shown in these postwar Christian subjects by Dalí, and at least in one case, the visage of Christ is substituted with a masculine face of his wife, Gala, as in his Last Supper, in the collection of the National Gallery in Washington.
Gala also appears in Ecumenical Council as St. Helen (the mother of Constantine), but she seems miscast in this role, and the overly realistic (but beautifully rendered) portrayal of her is never believable as anything other than Gala posing in a costume. She looks directly and somewhat uneasily at the viewer, while below, Dalí glances away from his uninscribed canvas to something or someone just to the viewer’s left, as if momentarily distracted. In the heavens above float bishops and councils, like clouds rendered with a transparency and lightness that suggest dreams or opiated fantasies. An Annunciation also seems to be taking place in the sky, no doubt another historical quotation.
But what are St. Helen, a terrified, nearly nude, colossal, faceless Christ, swarms of tiny bishops and prelates and an Annunciation supposed to signify? It is not easy to discern what the artist meant to convey.
I suppose it may reflect a general optimism for the leadership of the newly elected Pope John XXIII, who in the previous year had welcomed the Archbishop of Canterbury to the Vatican, and who was shortly to call the Second Vatican Council (in Roman Catholic parlance, the 21st ecumenical council, though not defined as such by Anglicans). But the elements in the Dalí painting do not add up to any discernable meaning, as far as I can see. More like a fever dream or an acid trip than a mystical vision, paintings like this are classical only in their technique.
Despite the failure of most of his religious subjects, in my opinion, the exhibit in Boston presents a cogent overview of the artist’s Surrealist period of the 1930s, including some of his best work from that decade, and so the show is worthwhile. Unfortunately, there is no catalogue for the exhibit.
Biographer Ian Gibson has suggested that Dalí’s embrace of Catholicism was part of ingratiating himself with the fascist government of Spain after the war, which was vehemently Catholic. He was previously removed from the Surrealist group because of his portrayal of fascist leaders in his work, including Hitler.
Almost all of Dalí’s Catholic work is characterized by this insincerity — it always seems so forced and artificial. In his Vision of Saint John of the Cross, however, the artist is illustrating not his own but someone else’s vision, based on the saint’s description of his transcendent experience. Its authenticity in Dalí’s Catholic oeuvre is unique.