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Most vintage Dali was painted before his 35th birthday in 1939. In these canvases, like the familiar The Persistence of Memory, 1931, we are looking down the wrong end of the telescope at a brilliant, clear, shrunken and poisoned world whose deep mannerist perspective and sharp patches of shadow invite the eye but not the body. One could not imagine walking on that stretched, satiny beach among the oozing watches. This atmosphere of voyeurism lent force to Dali's obsessive imagery of impotence, violence and guilt.
Even in his most extreme moments of anticlerical shock, Dali remained a Spanish Catholic. He inherited from Spanish devotional art a paralyzing morbidity about flesh. He liked anything that was not erect: running Camembert, soft watches, sagging loaves of flesh held up by crutches. Naturally all this was much more shocking 50 years ago than it is today: Dali was regularly denounced by Fascists and Stalinists alike as a decadent threat to youth. When he could no longer annoy either the bourgeoisie or the self- appointed guardians of the proletariat, he mortally offended the avant- garde by embracing Franco and the Pope, and was duly drummed out of the surrealist group for it.
Dali's reaction, natural in such an enfant terrible, was to become more royalist than the King and more ostentatiously greedy than his Palm Beach and Hollywood patrons. If the net result was a tacky, phosphorescent caricature of Genius at Work, an embarrassment to most aficionados, it is still inconceivable that Dali the bad boy will ever be expelled from the pantheon of modern imagination.