Before there was Lady Gaga, before there was Andy Warhol, there was Salvador Dalí.
The apotheosis of the celebrity artist, Dalí worked as hard at creating a persona as he did at painting his mind-melting surrealist art. He curried favor with the rich and powerful, hawked his products on television, hired out his image to sell chocolate, Scotch and Alka Seltzer and leveraged his notoriety to create a fortune worth millions.
Taking a page from Dalí’s marketing playbook, the High Museum is also pulling out all the stops to sell its new show, “Dalí: The Late Work,” which opens Aug. 7.
Of the billboards, posters, promotional knickknacks and soirees meant to promote the exhibition, Dalí would approve. The Catalan dandy, famous for his drooping clocks and rampant mustache, would have particularly enjoyed the pomp surrounding the arrival late last month of a centerpiece for the show, a 13 1/2-by-10-foot painting called “Santiago El Grande.”
The wall-size canvas depicts St. James, Spain’s patron saint, mounted on horseback, grasping a gigantic crucifix, backed by angels, clouds, a lattice-work of ethereal arches and intimations of radioactivity.
It’s one of Dalí’s largest paintings and one of the largest that the High has ever displayed.
A ‘fantastic’ addition
On a recent Thursday afternoon a crowd of photographers, videographers and invited guests watched as the lid on a purpose-built packing case was opened and the wall-sized Dalí painting was revealed.
Looking rather calm as a crew lifted the 250-pound work of art from its foam and plywood cocoon was Terry Graff, curator of the Beaverbrook Gallery in New Brunswick, Canada, and steward of the immense canvas.
“This is the signature painting at the Beaverbrook,” said Graff. “There’s a real sense of ownership by the people of New Brunswick.”
David Brenneman, the High’s director of collections and exhibitions, exulted in the moment. “When we got this painting,” he said, “we realized that not only was it going to be a good Dalí show, it was going to be fantastic.”
The Santiago painting is one of several coming from long distances for the show. The High is also borrowing “The Madonna of Port Lligat” from Fukuoka, Japan, and “Christ of St. John of the Cross” from the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow, Scotland.
The three overtly Christian paintings are typical of Dalí’s later focus on Catholicism. Though Dalí made a practice of trying to mess with our expectations, Dalí expert Elliott King, who is curating the show, said it was unlikely that Dalí’s religious convictions were another put-on.
“It was in his work for the next 40 years,” said King, attired for the Santiago unveiling in a four-button gray-and-purple striped suit, pink shirt, paisley tie and pocket square. King’s ring was set with a convincing artificial eyeball. “That’s a long time to put up a sham.”
Antics over art
Some art critics consider much of Dalí’s late career a sham.
After rocking the art world in the 1920s and ’30s with such iconic images as the bleak landscape of “The Persistence of Memory,” Dalí became better known for his antics than his art.
● He once arrived to deliver a lecture at the Sorbonne in a convertible Rolls Royce filled with heads of cauliflower.
● After moving to the United States, he and his wife, Gala, hosted psychedelic “happenings” where they served dinners of live frogs to such film notables as Bob Hope.
● He once sent Harpo Marx a harp with barbed wire strings and worked on a script for a Marx Brothers film to be called “Giraffes on Horseback Salad.” It was never produced.
● He was adept at staying in the press, and appeared in Life magazine six times in one 12-month period. His longtime collaborator and Life photographer, Philippe Halsman, helped stoke the star-making machinery, producing remarkable images of Dalí, including a familiar tableau composed of flying cats, a bucket of water and a floating easel.
● Dalí embraced television culture. He talked himself up on “What’s My Line” and painted a shaving cream masterpiece on “I’ve Got a Secret.” He brought an anteater with him to an appearance on the “Dick Cavett Show” and unceremoniously dumped it into silent film star Lillian Gish’s lap. She was not amused.
But he also was heavily criticized for crass commercialism. In 1939 fellow surrealist Andre Breton devised the derisive nickname “Avida Dollars,” an anagram of the name Salvador Dalí that essentially means “eager for dollars” to sum up Dalí’s relentless pursuit of commerce.
Chance to reassess
Yet Dalí maintained a retinue of friends in high places. He connected in New York with Andy Warhol, who may have seen in Dalí the template of the artist he wanted to be.
Famed biologist James Watson learned of Dalí’s painting “Homage to Watson and Crick” and thought the artist might want to collaborate. He sent Dalí a note that read: “The second brightest man in the world wants to meet the brightest.”
By then Dalí had become fascinated with quantum physics, microbiology and nuclear power, and devised a philosophy that he called “nuclear mysticism.”
Though posters of works such as the image of Christ crucified on a hypercube (“Crucifixion/Corpus Hypercubus”) have appeared on the walls of a thousand freshman dorm rooms, this period failed to light the art world on fire.
“Dalí’s early work is the stuff that made anybody care,” said Stuart Horodner, artistic director of the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center. “Most serious artists and art critics will tell you at a certain point Dalí becomes a joke, a publicity machine.”
But the establishment’s distaste for Dalí’s megalomania has obscured the quality of his late art, the Dalí scholar King suggests.
“I don’t think the late period has gotten its due,” King said. “That’s why this show is a great opportunity to reassess Dalí’s career.”
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People behind the painting
This is the first time “Santiago El Grande” has left the Beaverbrook Gallery since it was given to the gallery in 1959 by Sir James and Lady Dunn.
Lady Dunn might have been a woman after Dalí’s own heart, a well-born Londoner who was secretary to Canadian financier Sir James Dunn and 36 years his junior when they married in 1942; following Dunn’s death she married a second millionaire, Baron Beaverbrook, also a native of New Brunswick, when he was 84 and she was 53. Beaverbrook died the next year.
Dalí offered to immortalize Sir James and Lady Dunn. The portraits he created are also in the High’s show. Dalí painted the aquiline Lady as a falconer on horseback (she owned a stable of winning racehorses) and her husband as a toga-clad Caesar in a Mediterranean landscape. Sir Dunn wasn’t fond of his picture.
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Event preview
“Dalí : The Late Work”
Saturday through Jan. 9. High Museum of Art, 1280 Peachtree St. N.E., Atlanta. 404-733-4444; www.high.org .
Also: "Dalí: A Passion for Film" series. Films and shorts, including the artist's cinematic work with Luis Bunuel, Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock; Aug. 21, 28 and Sept. 11; Rich Auditorium, Woodruff Arts Center, 1280 Peachtree St. N.E., Atlanta. 404-733-4444; www.high.org .
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Related exhibits
Dalí lithographs. Fourteen prints never publicly exhibited before. Oglethorpe University Museum of Art. Through Sept. 5. 404-364-8555, www.museum.oglethorpe.edu
Works by Dalí. More than 200 pieces, including woodblock prints, sculptures and tapestry. Regency Fine Art, Aug. 16-Oct. 30. 6458 Dawson Blvd. Norcross; 770-840-7701; www.regencyfineart.com
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