Dali in 3-D

By ROBERT HUGHES

In the 30-odd years since Salvador Dali separated from the surrealist movement, he has leaped from one extravagant triviality to the next, combining the roles of circus freak, spangled elephant and Barnum himself. The performance is tinted with sadness. Dali is undoubtedly the last of the great dandies, but nobody accepts his own belief that he is the last of the great artists, heir to Vermeer and Velasquez. The baroque costume jewelry, the monarchist-Catholic oratory, the worn stock of crutches and soft watches--all have dust on them. Even the trembling antennas of that fabled mustache have apparently ceased to receive or transmit anything.

Dali's latest attempt at a comeback is his current show at Knoedler's in Manhattan. It is a lugubrious event, more rummage sale than exhibition. Though it was not conceived as a retrospective, it spans about four decades of his output and so gives some sense of the appalling decline that his talent has suffered. To see some of Dali's best early work, like the tiny Specter of Sex Appeal (1934), is almost to confront a different painter: somewhere along the line that nightmarish distinctness and mystery of image, in which every speck of paint possessed a tension like the casing of a grenade that was about to explode, vanished. What replaced it was ornamental theater.

In recent years, Dali has tried to give his work a quasiscientific dimension by toying with such themes as Einstein's theory of relativity and the discovery of the DNA spiral. The latest Nobel laureate to experience his attentions is Dr. Dennis Gabor, the inventor of holography. A holograph, made with laser beams, has the property of accurately reproducing an object in three dimensions. "All artists," proclaims Dali, "have been concerned with three-dimensional reality since the time of Velasquez, and in modern times the analytic Cubism of Picasso tried again to capture the three dimensions of Velasquez. Now, with the genius of Gabor, the possibility of a new Renaissance in art has been realized with the use of holography. The doors have been opened for me into a new house of creation."

The house may be new, but its cupboards are rather bare. The images are banal--a Yale basketball player leaping upward "in the process of becoming an angel"; card players at a table, in homage to Cezanne, superimposed on fragments of a Velasquez as background. Dali has simply made use of a different medium for all his old and familiar mannerisms. .Robert Hughes

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