Word: daly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...spanning his life from the confidence of youth to the melancholy and distance of his afflicted age. The face thickens, the eyes sag, the Bourbon lip takes on a heavy repressed pathos; you can almost see it quiver. Only the mustache, whose upswept prongs will be imitated by Salvador Dali's, seems alert, like antennae. "It is now nine years since any ((portrait)) has been made," Philip IV noted in 1653, in the last decade of his and his painter's lives, "and I am little inclined to subject myself to Velazquez's phlegm, nor thus to find further reason...
...market have inspired a hot new trade in phony prints. Hundreds of people have paid as much as $4,000, sight unseen, for "limited-edition" originals. The FTC has sued Federal Sterling Galleries, a telemarketer in Scottsdale, Ariz., for allegedly peddling photographs of artworks as authentic prints by Salvador Dali...
Most vintage Dali was painted before his 35th birthday in 1939. In these canvases, like the familiar The Persistence of Memory, 1931, we are looking down the wrong end of the telescope at a brilliant, clear, shrunken and poisoned world whose deep mannerist perspective and sharp patches of shadow invite the eye but not the body. One could not imagine walking on that stretched, satiny beach among the oozing watches. This atmosphere of voyeurism lent force to Dali's obsessive imagery of impotence, violence and guilt...
Even in his most extreme moments of anticlerical shock, Dali remained a Spanish Catholic. He inherited from Spanish devotional art a paralyzing morbidity about flesh. He liked anything that was not erect: running Camembert, soft watches, sagging loaves of flesh held up by crutches. Naturally all this was much more shocking 50 years ago than it is today: Dali was regularly denounced by Fascists and Stalinists alike as a decadent threat to youth. When he could no longer annoy either the bourgeoisie or the self- appointed guardians of the proletariat, he mortally offended the avant- garde by embracing Franco...
...Dali's reaction, natural in such an enfant terrible, was to become more royalist than the King and more ostentatiously greedy than his Palm Beach and Hollywood patrons. If the net result was a tacky, phosphorescent caricature of Genius at Work, an embarrassment to most aficionados, it is still inconceivable that Dali the bad boy will ever be expelled from the pantheon of modern imagination...