Word: daly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...historians have never been comfortable with Joan Miró. A surrealist? The admirers of Dali or Magritte would not agree. An abstractionist? Miró says he never painted an abstraction in his life. Everything "is always a sign of something. It is always a man, a bird, or something else," he insists. The Miró admirers who have now mounted a selection of 45 of his paintings at Washington's Hirshhorn Museum have another proposition: Miró is simply a great painter. Says Hirshhorn Director Abram Lerner: "Miró's place is alongside the most fertile of those...
...beady eye for the American jugular, finally managed to annihilate his earlier self-Mad Dog Sal, the insecure and ravenously aggressive young lounge lizard whose tiny, enameled visions helped create one of the extreme moments of dandyist revolt and modernist disgust. But today the only interesting thing about Dali is the obsessive grip of his pose. He has convinced a public that could hardly tell a Vermeer from a Velásquez that he is the spiritual heir to both painters. And he has done so, not through art but by the diffusion of small anecdotes. Everything is calculated, literally...
...difference between a madman and me," Dali is often quoted as saying, "is that I am not mad." Indeed, he is not; and that is why the Pompidou Center is crowded. Dali's public hopes to meet a mind which fulfills its two ruling clichés about artists-the painter as old master (Raphael, Rubens) and the artist as freak (Van Gogh, Rimbaud). Dali gives his public a tacky, vivid caricature of both while fulfilling neither. No modern painter has armored himself more assiduously in mediocrity...
Right from the start, Dali was a glacial opportunist with weak powers of formal invention. He was also precocious and adroit, and so, as one might expect, his early work is an anthology of secondhand manners. He begins as a late-Picasso cubist, turning out bland art deco still lifes that contain a few premonitions of his later imagery; the lank, droopy fish in Moonlit Still Life, 1927, for example, predicts the flaccidity that was to appear in his soft watches and piano lids. But he did not find a style until he came to Paris and met the surrealists...
...What interests me about you," Freud is said to have told Dali, "is not your unconscious mind, but your conscious." He was right; not only did the pores of Dab' 's invention stop oozing about 40 years ago, but the repetition of his stock in trade (the nudes with drawers and lip sofas, burning giraffes and lanky, deliquescent women, the double-image paintings of landscape becoming figure in the manner of 16th century puzzle pictures) be came a bore. Of his latest work, with its grand claims to incarnate everything from the secrets of the DNA molecule...