The Dali News

Of all artists now living, Salvador Dali may be the best known. His candelabra-style mustache stands as a public symbol of Bohemian independence. His most famous canvas, which he called The Persistence of Memory and which everyone else remembers as The Limp Watches, has been part of popular imagery since 1932. But is Dali serious? The answer, yes.

He understands physics. This simple fact is at least as difficult to conceive as the fact that Dali thoroughly masters painting. Blessed with an astounding facility with paint, he keeps stretching it; blessed with a coolly scientific intelligence, he stretches that, too. "In the surrealist period," he says, "I wanted to create the iconography of the interior world--the world of the marvelous, of my father Freud. I succeeded in doing it. Today the exterior world--that of physics --has transcended the one of psychology."

A huge Madonna, the centerpiece of Dali's new exhibition at Manhattan's Carstairs Gallery, improbably combines a memory of Raphael with a near photographic blowup of an ear. The dots of the photographic screen are like both atomic particles and little voids riddling the picture; they ripple and fade like a cloud of unknowing before the Renaissance image. A piece of paper floating on edge and a cherry hung on a string, painted to fool the eye, emphasize the strangeness of the rest. Dali's title for this weird and serious effort: Quasi-grey picture which, closely seen, is an abstract one; seen from two metres is the Sistine Madonna of Raphael; and from fifteen metres is the ear of an angel measuring one metre and a half; which is painted with antimatter; therefore with pure energy.

Modern science's view of antimatter as oddly charged particles that disappear on contact with matter has some connection, Dali thinks, with the medievalists' view of angels, which could light in hosts upon the point of a pin. His new canvas relates to both concepts. Seen close, it does dissolve into pure abstraction--as abstract, say, as the goings-on in a physicist's cloud chamber.

Although his genius as an exhibitionist has often obscured his real importance as a painter, Dali clearly aims to exhibit many things besides himself. First on his list at present is the problem of finding visual equivalents for new-found scientific truths. To understand both painting and physics is not the same thing as to merge them, but Dali tries, and he is the only major painter making the attempt.

As solemn in his studio as any physicist, and equally bent on the barely possible, Dali pursues his difficult new way. "I have reached a turning point in my art," he says, staring over the waxed candelabra.

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