Now Americans will have a fresh opportunity to make up their own minds. I have had to work very hard to make it clear how serious he really was.” “He had a reputation that was hard to salvage. “They thought I was wasting my time,” she says. (He died in 1989 at age 84.) Writing in the British newspaper The Guardian a year ago, critic Robert Hughes dismissed Dalí’s later works as “kitschy repetition of old motifs or vulgarly pompous piety on a Cinemascope scale.” When Dawn Ades of England’s University of Essex, a leading Dalí scholar, began specializing in his work 30 years ago, her colleagues were aghast. And many art critics believe that he peaked artistically in his 20s and 30s, then gave himself over to exhibitionism and greed. “Compared to Velázquez, I am nothing,” he said in 1960, “but compared to contemporary painters, I am the most big genius of modern time.”ĭalí’s antics, however, often obscured the genius.
He loved creating a sensation, not to mention controversy, and early in his career exhibited a drawing, titled Sacred Heart, that featured the words “Sometimes I Spit with Pleasure on the Portrait of My Mother.” Publicity and money apparently mattered so much to Dalí that, twitching his waxed, upturned mustache, he endorsed a host of products for French and American television commercials. He relished courting the masses, and he was probably better known, especially in the United States, than any other 20th-century painter, including even fellow Spaniard Pablo Picasso. Salvador Dalí spent much of his life promoting himself and shocking the world.
0 kommentar(er)
