“Dalí: Disruption and Devotion,” which just opened at the Museum of Fine Arts, is two things I did not expect it to be: Beautiful and profound. I’m not alone in presupposing Salvador Dalí to be a gifted lightweight — an unparalleled painter whose bombastic self-promotion made his oddball pictures a favorite on dorm room walls the world over. (Admit it — you had a posterized version of those floppy clocks Scotch-taped above your bed at 19, too.
) Being in love with his own celebrity — can you name another painter who was a regular guest of Johnny Carson and Dick Cavett ? — had always threatened to subsume Dali’s painterly might. The poet André Breton , Surrealism’s founder, cast him out of its inner circle in 1939 precisely for that naked ambition. Dalí, who died in 1989, responded by making himself bigger than any of them — René Magritte, Max Ernst, his friend and fellow Spaniard Joan Miró — though his crude grasp at fame would obscure whether he was a better artist.
Exploring the roots of his practice here — roots deeply entwined in the history of painting — allows the defense to rest: He was. The exhibition — Dalí’s first at the MFA — is set in rich, dark galleries with oddly angled walls painted deep crimson, purple, and mustard. Frederic Ilchman, the MFA’s chair of European painting, opens by giving the people what they want: “The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory,” 1952-54.
It’s a 2.0 version of those unrelen.
