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SALVADOR DALI

Mountain Lake (1938)
Oil on canvas 75cm X 92cm/28 3/4 in X 36 1/4 in

Dali's enormous appetite and talent for self-promotion and showmanship, his rhetorica and evasive writings,his gladiatorial capacity for debate and spectacle have so seduced the public imagination and the agencies of repro-duction that he has some claim to being the most popular of twentieth-century painters.

There has always been a wide gulf, however, between his popular and his art historical reputations. Far from allowing his work to stand as paradigms of the Surrealist spirit, critics have been quick to label him as a 'char-latan', as non-avant-garde in his rejection of modernist techniques and styles, and as a vul-gar herald of 'the triumph of publicity over art'.

Salvador Dali was born in May 1904 in Figueras in north-eastern Spain. He retained vivid and powerful recollections of the local landscape. Dali's first instruction and interests were thoroughly academic and largely nineteenth century. In 1921 he entered the 1 school of Fine Arts in Madrid, where he met the poet Frederico Garci Lorca (1899-1936) and the future film maker Luis Bunuel (b 1900). During the late 1920s Dali became progress-ively enthralled by some of the ideas and ex-periments of Surrealism; but there is a sense in which he was never a real convert. His alle-giance was eccentric, and his paintings, like the work of most of the 'visual' Surrealists, did not toe the line of Andre Breton's manifesto orthodoxy.

As an artist Dali has employed a bewilder-ing range of media apart from the photo-graphic or 'magic' realism for which he is so well known. His defence of the conceptual priority of ideas above the materials and tech-niques used to express them is an indication that he would accept no hierarchic order of im-portance for his various activities, and that he often considered words and sentences to be as effective carriers of information as, for example, oil painting. He worked in film, advertising, set and costume design for theater and ballet; he made jewelry, holographs, installations and a variety of Surrealist and other 'objects'. In more orthodox representational areas he used oil on board, panels, wood and canvas; mixed oil with collage and sand; drew on paper with ink, pencil and charcoal, and even put oil on embossed pewter. In 1958 he exhibited atomic 'anti-matter' paintings in New York. The list could go on.

Of all these techniques and styles, however, it was in oil on canvas and in the scrupulously detailed style of photographic realism which dominated his painting from about 1929 on-wards that Dali found the suitable vehicle to express his alternative Surrealist theory of 'crit-ical paranoia'. This self-induced state of delu-sion is evoked in a work such as Mountain Lake by the disparity of register between meticu-lous technical realism and the hallucinatory interruption of objects which subvert the nor-mality of the 'scene'.

With typical erudition Dali wrote in La Conquete de l'irrational (Conquest of the Irrational)
(1935) that: 'My whole ambition in the pictorial domain is to materialize the images of concrete irrationality with the most im-perialist fury of precision in order that the world of imagination and concrete irrational-ity may be as objectively evident, of the same consistency, of the same durability, of the same persuasive, cognoscitive and communicable thickness as that of the exterior world of phe-nomenal reality.'

Dali thus took an anti-modernist position on the nature of his technique and materials. Rather than celebrating the canvas surface as the site of visual autonomy and indulging in the play of shape and color he communicated certain psychic effects as though his paint medium were transparent. It is, therefore, par-ticularly difficult here to separate a technical analysis from other considerations.

The first impression of Mountain Lake is of the somber bluey, grey-green crepuscular atmosphere which saturates the picture, only to be enlivened by points and flashes of light and reflection. This tonal.ubiquity is one of the several devices by which Dali attempts to per-suade the view of the seamlessness of his paint application. The modulation of the vast area of darkening sky in opposition to the calculated specificity of the rocks and pebbles on the shore of the lake is another encourage-ment. A photograph of the work in raking light reveals minutely molded scumbling with careful tints of color, particularly in the cliff face to the left of center. All this technical vir-tuosity solicits an investment of belief in the image.

Practically, then, Dali did all he could to convince the viewer of the truth of the scene; a commercial white ground was applied to a standard-format closely woven canvas and then partially overlaid by a thin primary. The main contours were probably penciled onto the surface before color was applied with a variety of small sable brushes. In order to con-trol the minutest of details Dali would rest his painting arm on a maulstick and scrutinize small areas with a jeweler's glass.

But these extravagant efforts at verisimili-tude are merely the means for the communica-tion of much broader ideas and paradoxes. In Mountain Lake, having registered the fairly blatant visual pun of the lake as a fish, one is left with the oblique and ironic allusion to the 1938 telephone conversations between Chamberlain and Hitler. The disconnected cable and the sedentary snails are eloquent testimonies to a series of non-sequiturs activated by the central opposition between dream and reality. This, in turn, is successful because of the technical seductiveness of the picture.

Attention to the teclmical devices of Dali's Mountain Lake is apparently minimized by the scrupulously realistic execution; but expectations of 'reading through' the image are frustrated by formal as well as iconographic interruptions. The fish-shape of the lake, and the parallelogram whicli encloses it provide the best examples.

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