Dali in
Hollywood
Dalí: Painting &
Film
Los Angeles County Museum
of Art
Destino is the major work explicated by dozens of storyboard drawings in ink,
with full-scale paintings in oil on Masonite to solidify such an image as the
ball surrounded by a Dalinian landscape. The film as realized five or six
decades later is but a fraction of the work intended, as the digital technique
is incapable of rendering many subtleties and the direction overlooks them (the
observing eyes in Dali’s sketch look so intensely that one projects a
hand and arm from its eyeball, this becomes a 3-D modeled statuary group
without dramatic force), and at the same time it is one of Dali’s
greatest creations, eight months of daily labor at Disney Studios left so much
material that the work has been communicated, and even in its incomplete state
must have influenced Disney’s tenderly surrealistic view of femininity in
the 1951 full-length animation Alice in Wonderland.
Dali’s oil
paintings and a painted backdrop show that Hitchcock’s Spellbound
received his every care. Ingrid Bergman wears glasses and Gregory Peck has no
moustache, but the resemblance to Gala and Dali is the understanding no-one
else has, in England, anyway.
Tantalizing
sketches and notes for Moontide, which was to have been directed by
Fritz Lang, and La Femme Surréaliste, which
was to star the Marx Brothers, are summarily included. Video screens run Impressions
de la Haute Mongolie, Chaos and Creation,
Warhol’s screen test, L’Age
d’Or and Un Chien Andalou. A multiplane
glass box and a scenario for Babaouo (with a
poster) announce an unrealized film of “young Anna Kareninas”
and bicyclists with bread-loaf hats, a central image.
Portrait of
Colonel Jack Warner is a
meticulously-fashioned conveyance of the great producer’s likeness and
that of his dog, the craft is in the lapels and manicured hands and tie and
every element of the composition, disposed as foreground to a classical
allegory of the muse and the actor easy and straightforward in its
acknowledgment of this giant in the cinema, an intimate, grinning portrayal.
Subtlety is the
mainspring of all the paintings assembled in the curators’ production of
the traveling show, they admit Persistence of
Memory, a diminutive masterpiece, to indicate the glories of self-evident
works not present. Rather, the meaning of Dali’s works is to be teased
out of them, a plain language to be associated with Freudian analysis and
surrealist poesy, they are built from the inside out and always express cogent
thoughts and themes that baffle the Telegraph and the Los Angeles Times
(during the war years, Dali exhibited at a gallery in the Ambassador Hotel).
Metamorphosis of
Narcissus shows a middle case, its
tiny dancing figures in the background ignore (as though it were Auden’s
Icarus) the mythological character transformed from immemorial self-indulgence
to an egg-born flower in hand.