Art: Napoleon’s Nose & Other Objects

Salvador Dali, a slick painter and a calculating showman, who has made surrealism into a lucrative side show, combines the methods of the old masters and the madness of a slap-happy showoff. Both method and madness were appallingly apparent, as usual, in a new Dali show of eleven recent paintings which opened this week in Manhattan’s Bignou Gallery. He did all eleven in just nine months. The paintings were so delicately labored, so ingeniously jumbled, and so elaborately inconsequential that gallery-goers went away wondering how a mustachioed, 52-year-old child could possibly display such professional talent and such unhealthy notions. Sample Dali titles:

¶ Napoleon’s Nose, Transformed into a Pregnant Woman, Strolling His Shadow with Melancholia amongst Original Riiins.

¶ My Wife, Nude, Contemplating Her Own Flesh Becoming Stairs, Three Vertebrae of a Column, Sky and Architecture (see cut).

¶ The Flight, The Temptation, The Love, The Broken Wings.

¶ Uranium and Atomica Melancholica Idyll—which looked like a hastily dreamed-up nightmare to cash in on the atomic news: it seemed to be partly about elephants with giraffe’s legs, and partly about ballplayers sliding into third.

¶ Fountain of Milk Spreading Itself Uselessly upon Three Shoes.