Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Salvador Dalí
Spanish; 20th-century
St. Petersburg, FL: Salvador Dalí Museum (Exhibition: Alberto Giacometti & Salvador Dalí: Through & Beyond Surrealism)
38%
Femme Couchée. 1926. Oil on panel
The figure here is an obvious riff on pre-Cubist Picasso's Iberian nudes. Dalí was a bad-faith copyist. Rather than take Picasso's pictorial ideas and attempt somehow to transform them (or else just record the other artist's style in an effort to understand it), Dalí has instead smoothed out and simplified Picasso's forms so as to subject his art to ridicule. The problem isn't that Dalí ought not to have made jokes on his countryman, but rather that he sacrificed pictorial integrity to do so: all of the brushiness and contradicting planes of Picasso have given way to smooth shapes and regular shading and unsublimated desire and easy geometry. Sure, it's possible that, had Dalí's joke been sufficiently funny and open-ended, it could have aesthetically justified how middling this painting is, as a painting. But Picasso didn't need Dalí to spread his style's legs; Cubism ravishes itself. (TFS, 2026)
St. Petersburg, FL: Salvador Dalí Museum (Exhibition: Alberto Giacometti & Salvador Dalí: Through & Beyond Surrealism)
25%
Girl with Curls. 1926. Oil on panel
This painting proves Dalí to have been a pornographer, not just because of that tush but because there's so little on offer besides it. The way the panel's been painted seems borrowed from the landscapes on metal by Brueghel or from Ernst's decalcomania, but it possesses none of the former's limpid movement or the latter's shocking configurations of forms. Instead, Dalí seems to have construed this painting’s gradients, and to have peppered them here and there with a building or a bush, to provide a setting without visual difficulty for his vulgar Venus to flaunt through. Nothing in the landscape responds to her and she responds to nothing in it: she just bares. Never mind that there’s a little bit of grotesquery to the way the girl’s body bends: this enhances her butt’s appeal rather than alienates you from it (as might happen in a more serious surrealism than Dalí’s). The true lack of this artist's psychic complexity is made plainer here than in perhaps any other of his paintings. (TFS, 2026)