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In art, the fledgling Dali believed he could do anything -- including what other artists had done, which became "Dalinian" by virtue of being redone by him. The exhibition shows him running through the styles, with slowly increasing calculation, trying them on for fit. He was a 15-year-old Impressionist and then a 16-year-old Symbolist, painting his grandmother sewing in a foggy all-blue room; this veiled figure is the first of the Sibylline crones who would keep turning up in his later work. He does Fauve blotches -- Mediterranean with measles, after Matisse and Derain -- and combines them with elements of the classicizing movement which, in Catalunya, was known as noucentisme (20th century-ism), with "timeless" peasant figures, olive trees and old arches.
He paints himself as a phosphorescent dandy with a giant hat, and his father as a massive totem against the overheated landscape of Cadaques. This, one realizes, is the first painting by Dali that actually means something, that opens the Pandora's box of obsession of his later, Surrealist work. What it means is parricide. He sees his father as a dark colossus, a parody of the figures of patriarchy that bulked so large in Catalan folklore. Much of his work thereafter would be devoted to dragging the paternal giant from his pedestal.
Dali went to art school in Madrid in the early 1920s. "I'll be a genius," he wrote in his diary two years before that. "Perhaps I'll be despised and misunderstood, but I'll be a genius, a great genius." Cold and diligent, he figured out all his poses and provocations in advance. Politically, too, he wanted to be shocking; later Dali would turn into an archconservative, the living national treasure of Franco's long regime, but in the 1920s -- the years of Primo de Rivera's dictatorship -- he was a vehement parlor red. He even did jail time, briefly, when he was arrested as a reprisal against his father's left-wing political activity.
There was, however, nothing particularly revolutionary about his paintings. Seeking a credible genius costume, he did versions of Cubism, of De Chirico's pittura metafisica, and developed his dry, classicizing realism in such images as Seated Girl Seen from the Back, 1925. It is an easy matter to go through this early work identifying, here and there, what would grow and what would not: how the taste for smoothly curved profile and deep black relief that he got from Amedee Ozenfant's decorative Cubism, for instance, turned into Dali's later fondness for writhing, spookily dark shadows cast by figures on a flat ground-plane, the idealized desert of his paintings. Dali's obsession with Picasso reached a height of imitative flattery with his pastiches of the older painter's massive "classical" women in white fluted dresses. Likewise, when Dali the Surrealist was pupating, there was hardly a trope in his pictures of 1927-28 that didn't come out of Andre Masson, Ernst, Miro or Yves Tanguy.
But his originality as an artist began with his peculiar experiences of the natural world, such as the contorted rocks at Cape Creus, near his boyhood home, sculpted into fantastically ambiguous shapes by tide and weather; like faces seen in the fire, these were the foundation stones of what Dali called his "paranoiac-critical method" of seeking dream images. Dali's art may not tap far into his unconscious, but it reveals a great deal about what he imagined his unconscious to be.