Art: Dali Goes to Rehab

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Dali's most inspired decision was to reach back to late 19th century realism, to paint in a hyperdetailed style that could be more dreamlike than any of the fright-mask distortions of Picasso. Knowing very well how it would be received by militant modernists, he adopted Jean-Louis Ernest Meissonier, the last word in retrograde Academicism, as the model for his enameled surfaces and high-definition images. The final twist was that so many of Dali's images, all those flaccid watches and fluid shapes, remained utterly ambiguous. He cast the clearest light possible on unnameable things, as if to say that even clarity was of no help in penetrating the deepest enigmas.

By 1929 Dali had found his natural home among the Surrealists, who were fascinated, as he was, with the unconscious. But he departed almost at once from their favorite method of arriving there--automatic writing and drawing, in which words and pictures were set instantly to paper with a minimum of conscious deliberation. As an alternative, he came up with his "paranoiac-critical" method, which was an attempt to enter a kind of delirium while keeping a part of the mind detached, alert to the imperatives of the rational world. Whatever that meant, it led him to the dazzling trompe l'oeil illusionism of Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach, from 1938, which reads simultaneously as a landscape, a dog in profile, a human face and a tabletop with a fruit bowl holding a heap of pears. This is a canvas in which the eye leads the mind down unexpected roads while the mind keeps pulling back, trying to get its bearings.

In the years after World War II, when Dali began a long effort to reconcile his new passions--physics and religion--his reputation began its serious decline. And it can't be denied that his newly rediscovered Catholic piety led to some cheesy and meretricious paintings, like the portraits of his wife Gala as the Virgin. But it also produced the magnificent crucifixions of the early 1950s. With its sources in Zurbarán, Caravaggio and Velázquez, and with its hint of movie-camera angles that never quite happened in the movies, Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubicus) is one of the handful of truly powerful devotional images of 20th century art.

Then there were Dali's phenomenal dot paintings of the late '50s and early '60s: large-scale, intricate fields of enlarged Benday dots, those minute circles of ink that make up a newspaper or magazine photograph. In Portrait of My Dead Brother, an imaginary portrait of the real brother who died a few months before Dali was born, the dots mutate into a bird emerging from his head and ranks of soldiers at his chin. Images of struggle and flight, they match Dali's effort to come to terms with a ghostly brother whose name he was given. Then there's The Sistine Madonna, in which a detail of Raphael's Sistine Madonna is made to appear within a massive close-up of a human ear--the ear of Pope John XXIII, no less, much enlarged from a magazine photo. It may not be more than a tour de force of craftsmanship, like scrimshaw. But what's so bad about a tour de force? •