Dreams, Paranoiac

In Manhattan last week, having had as much advance publicity as Ringling Bros., Salvador Dali's new exhibition drew crowds that made the swank Julien Levy Gallery surge and prattle like the Normandie at sailing time. In the first five days sales totaled five drawings ($300-$800) and 14 paintings ($400-$3,000).

Persistent association with the smart money is suspect in an artist; so is a highly developed faculty for showmanship. Odd thing about Dali is that these qualities are apparently all of a piece with his art, yet his art has importance. Every Dali show since his first in Paris ten years ago has interested critics because 1) the art of painting needs fresh subject matter; 2) psychoanalysis has focused attention on dreams; 3) Dali seems able to recreate their haunting confusion, scale and illumination.

But the dream world which Dali has recorded is as specialized as it is vivid. Once a boy wonder at copying Vermeer and Leonardo, he discovered by self-analysis in Paris that he had a persecution complex (paranoia). His oil technique remains that of a brilliant, baleful Vermeer; his images are obsessive, malignant, and recur in painting after painting: unearthly shores and infinite plains, cliffs glowing with sunset, exhausted human profiles on flesh-blobs like stranded sea cows, attenuated human limbs held up by forked props and peduncles, shiny French telephones, lustrous big black ants. No. 1 criticism of Dali is that he repeats himself too much: he is unfortunately limited as a dreamer. No. 2 criticism is that his weaker paintings show the feverishness and cheapness of the merely "good idea."

The restless, wasp-waisted artist with his whimsical mustache and eyes of an old crystal-gazer declared last week that for him the period of Surrealist dream-documentation was about over, the period of Paranoiac painting just beginning. Example: The Image Disappears, a painting which is at once a Vermeer-like Young Girl Reading a Letter, and a beady-eyed portrait of a bearded man.

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