Back in 1970, many of us California art students were surrounded by a blaze of colors. To the left of us were the psychedelic album covers and neo-Art Nouveau rock concert posters. Behind us were the surferboard and hot-rod color stripes and enamels. And to our right were the hard-edged acrylics and black lights on fluorescent paints.
Once our eyes cleared, however, we saw an equally colorful blast from the past: the Surrealist art of Salvador Dali.
As art youngsters, we knew nothing about Dali in art history. Nor did we read the news magazines that featured the modern-day Spanish artist as a scandalous, jet-setting, art celebrity with a bizarre mustache. We only noticed Dali’s immaculate painting skill, what some call “magic realism.” His weird and detailed landscapes required close visual study.
For some of us, Dali was the standard of how we wanted to draw and paint. Once you could do that, you could take your viewer—and your imagination—just about anywhere. It was this, and not Abstract Expressionism or assemblages of detritus, that sparked our ambitions.
Eventually in art history class more of the scales would drop from our young eyes. We learned that Dali’s classic Surrealist paintings—melting clocks, eerie dry landscapes, and human figures that turned into chests-of-drawers—came from a bygone era, the 1920s and 1930s. He was part of a Freudian-type movement, whatever that was. It was enough to know he was trying to paint dreams. Later in life he was the rare artist to do anything interesting with religious themes.
Today in California, Dali may not be what he was to a few of us back in the 1970s. But for the rest of this year he’ll be receiving renewed attention. From July to November, the San Diego Museum of Art is the exclusive U.S. stopover for the exhibition, “El Greco to Dali: The Great Spanish Masters.” The exhibit features 64 works stretching from El Greco, Ribera, and Murillo to Picasso, Miró, and Dali. The works come from the private collection of one of Mexico wealthiest businessmen, Perez Simon, a native of Spain.
Since the Renaissance, the classic tradition of realistic painting had been claimed by the academy in Italy, and then France, when the academy in effect moved to Paris. Nevertheless, in its own dark tones—since Spanish painting downplayed color—Spanish realism has offered a striking alternative.
By the time a young Picasso came on the scene in the 1890s, he was competing with the realism of Murillo, Goya, and Velazquez (the one artist absent from the San Diego exhibit). Later, he came under the spell of El Greco and probably borrowed from his twilight blues and elongated figures.
Nothing in Spanish art, however, anticipated what Picasso, and later Juan Gris, would do with Cubism, or what the abstract painter Joan Miró would do with a precision world of tiny colorful objects, like so many amoeba under a microscope. With Dali, however, there came a full return to Spanish realism (and if the late Picasso was a bit more Greco-Roman in his revived realism, he always felt haunted by Velazquez).
The San Diego exhibit has an obvious resonance with southern California’s growing Latino population. In art today, many Hispanics are finding pride in their European roots. A major 2010 Picasso exhibition in Philadelphia, for example, drew an unprecedented Latino attendance.
For us young California art students around 1970, however, it was Dali (not Picasso) who was the draftsman and painter par excellence. His empty landscapes, distant cliffs, and boats on phantasmagoric waters seemed timeless (though not place-less, since his native region around the Barcelona coastline was a lifelong influence).
According to some psychological theories of how people learn to appreciate art, the teenage years are attracted to realism in art skills. The fact remains that, in high school, students who can draw and paint realistically are the ones who most predictably think about studying art in college. In developmental theory, however, teenage tastes can change with age. Not a few art kids give up drawing, for instance, to join the avant-garde, which these days ranges from installation and conceptual art to video.
Following this developmental path further, the instinct of late youth often is revived in old age. When people get old they tend, once again, to appreciate more traditional art. After a long weary ride through life, senior citizens view artistic skill as trumping most other claims to artistic creativity. In the past century, not a few famous artists who gave up tradition for wild experiments have, in the end, returned to “figurative” painting.
As teens in art school, we saw Dali’s magic realism as having both show-off skill and a bizarreness that suited California after the 1960s. At that age, it was probably best that we did not know too much about Dali’s own bizarre life, or his politics. It was enough to know that, with Spanish roots in old Europe, he seemed way ahead of Grateful Dead posters, photo-silk-screens, plaster body casting, and hard-edge surfboard design.
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