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Students of surrealism rank with Founder Breton and converted Dadaist Max Ernst, several practitioners of equal or greater importance. There is the able Italian Giorgio de Chirico, who, besides his familiar studies of prancing horses and Roman columns, likes to paint surrealist views of long deserted streets in dream cities, adding to one work a startling note by carefully painting realistic tea biscuits on the end of a painted crate. There is Philadelphia-born Man Ray, who is not only an able painter but manages to imbue Rayograph pictures of bits of wire, corks and lumps of sugar with exactly the eerie quality that surrealists desire. Least concerned with sexual symbolism and one of the most commercially successful of surrealists is genteel, dapper Pierre Roy, whose gay arrangements of bright ribbons, bits of seashells, sticks and empty wine glasses have long charmed socialites, advertising art directors and smartchart editors. But surrealism would never have attracted its present attention in the U. S. were it not for a handsome 32-year-old Catalan with a soft voice and a clipped cinemactor's mustache, Salvador Dali.
Dali. Artist Dali was born in Figueras near Barcelona in 1904, as a child developed a strong persecution mania and a wholehearted admiration for the works of his friend and countryman, Pablo Picasso. Salvador Dali entered the Academy in Madrid, was quickly expelled for insubordination. As an art student he reached Paris in 1927 when surrealism had yet to make any headlines but was the talk of the Montparnasse cafes.
Surrealism suited his extraordinary technical facility as a draughtsman, his morbid nature. Salvador Dali, with exquisite drawing and brilliant color, began to paint his nightmares on pieces of panel hardly bigger than postcards. He not only made surrealist paintings, he wrote surrealist poems, helped produce the first two surrealist films: Le Chien Andalou and L'Age d'Or. The first had a great deal to do with pianos filled with carcasses of dead donkeys. In the latter the great seduction scene to which the whole film rises is symbolized by a view of a bedroom window through which are thrown a blazing pine tree, an enormous plow, an Archbishop, a giraffe and a cloud of feathers.
Salvador Dali was first brought to the U. S. and given an exhibition in 1934 under the sponsorship of Dealer Julien Levy. Immediately one picture created a sensation. Entitled The Persistence of Memory, it showed a group of watches, limp as dead flounders and crawling with insects, drooping from the branches of a dead tree by the seaside, all this on a panel the size of a sheet of typewriter paper and painted in color as brilliant as a Flemish primitive. It now belongs to the Museum of Modern Art and was a headliner in last week's exhibition. Other interesting Dalis exhibited included a drawing, fine as an Italian master's, of a nude woman with a body made of half-open bureau drawers, and a painting of a group of African natives squatting before a dome-shaped hut (see p. 61).