If I sketch in my
impressions of a painter here, it is primarily because he was also a number of
other things, not least of all a writer of some scope and imaginative flair, as
amply demonstrated by both Hidden Faces, his only novel, and The Unspeakable
Confessions ..., a sort of antinovel-cum-autobiography which embraces,
besides 'portraits' of his personal life and background, examples of his rather
arcane philosophical contentions and proofs of a no-less arcane, one might even
say bizarre, scholarship. In short, a
kind of Sadian/Milleresque hotchpotch of views and
experiences making for a uniquely
Dali, the painter with a great mind, not a second-rate artist
but a genius unique in his time, as unique as Bosch or Rubens on even Dadd in their respective times, the creator of
unprecedented and unsurpassed masterpieces of transmuted realism - Surrealism a
kind of idealistic realism suggesting a right-wing liberal bias, an abstract
enigma in form. Admittedly, there are
surrealist works that, whether or not by Dali, suggest just the opposite -
namely the materialistic realism of a left-wing liberal bias. But, generally, Dali's works display a wavicle rather than a particle painterly technique, an oily
smear of fastidiously-applied brushstrokes which are the very antithesis to the
dotty, smudgy, lumpy, cubic applications of paint favoured, as a rule, by
left-wing schools, whether pointillist, cubist, expressionist, abstract
expressionist, tachist, or whatever.
Of course, not all of Dali's paintings can be classified as
surreal. Far from it! There are early works that are realistic,
purely and simply, and later ones that are effectively symbolist, almost
Christian in their religious directness, showing the influence of Op Art and
Kinetics, comparatively recent techniques applied to traditional religious
themes ... as though a metaphorical embodiment, in art, of Francoist
dictatorship, which ran concurrently with the greater part of the artist's late
period, when he was resident in his Catalan homeland, the adventurism of Paris
surrealism far behind him. If Dali's
late work is, on the whole, rather more mystical than realistic or surreal, it
should be seen, I believe, against this background of Francoism,
which gave the Catholic Church a new lease-of-life and preserved Latin
civilization, not least of all in the form of Dali's art.
Yet whilst I can, or could, admire much of his painting, no
matter how surreal or quasi-symbolist it may be, being a writer myself, I chiefly
admired his literary writings, particularly Hidden Faces, which, in its treatment
of the unrequited love of the Comte de Grandsailles,
the male protagonist, so to speak, for Solonge de Cleda, dealt with a theme all too familiar, and therefore
perversely congenial, to myself, even down to the substitution of the spiritual
image of the loved one for her physical presence ... in a sublimation - Dali
terms it 'Cledarism' - intended to compensate the
victim of the passion in question for the absence of more tangible
satisfactions. Nowadays I doubt that I
would wish to re-read Hidden Faces, though at the time, several years
ago, I thought it one of the greatest novels I had ever read, a novel seemingly
ranking, in exotic sophistication, with Huysmans' À
Rebours and Roussel's Locus
Solus.
