Dilly Dali

The people who came to Manhattan's conservative, brown-walled Knoedler gallery last week brought their poodles with them. The women wore full-length minks, the men wore grey ties to match grey suits. They babbled in twelve languages. It was the kind of crowd that Salvador Dali likes best, and there was the Spanish surrealist, who is now 59, in all his gaudy glory. His well-beeswaxed mustachios are a little shorter than they were. But his habitual gilt vest still glittered as he brandished his enameled cane and explained in cryptic Franglais the 30 new works that he had brought with him to the U.S.

As usual, they were dillies, a superbly executed potpourri inspired by Bali's antic muse. There were subtle pencil drawings of nudes, erotic washes produced by the inky wiggling of a live baby octopus, fiery battle scenes with paint laid on thick enough to thrill a pastry chef. Of course, there was also his super-surrealism, typically in GALACIDALACIDEOXYRIB ONUCLEICACID (Homage to Crick and Watson), a title so long that it resorts to a parenthetical remark. In a slick equation of Botticelli and biochemistry, Dali portrays a translucent God lifting the dead Christ into heaven, superimposed on the molecular structure of life-bearing DNA or deoxynbonucleic acid, the discovery of which led to Nobel Prizes for Drs. Francis Crick and James D. Watson in 1962.

A companion work is Fifty abstract pictures which as seen from two yards change into three Lenines masquerading as Chinese and as seen from six yards appear as the head of a royal tiger. The painting lives up to every detail in its title. Explains Dali: "Eeet is like le floor of a hotel room que je stayed in avec mosaic and a rug shaped like the head of a tigre." The heads of Lenin, filling triangles between the mosaic squares are disguised as Fu Manchu, and the whole work forms a tiger head.

Dali, who has dabbled in every style since impressionism, has now reached Pop art as well. One canvas faithfully reproduces the text of a Spanish newspaper reporting the Christine Keeler affair. There is more to it than just that swears Dali. If flies are permitted to swarm on it, he says, they will take such positions that their defecation will reveal the presently invisible heads of Socrates, Homer and Lorenzo de Medici in between the lines.

But Dali's Pop is hardly a bang. It is just another gesture in the best work of art that he has ever made--himself Vermeer was truly a great Pop artiste " he grandly announces. "He really painted what eees there. But today's Pop art is too romantic." By this Dali means that everyday objects painted literally are not worth the adoration poured into them by U.S. Pop artists. When Dali painted his famous limp watches they were, at least, bent by 90 degrees--and thus, to his eye, "symbols of memory slipping down the throat of God."

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