Two greats sparking off each other
They must be the ultimate odd couple of modern art. On the face of it, it’s hard to imagine that Salvador Dalí, the wild-eyed surrealist showman, and Marcel Duchamp, the inscrutable godfather of conceptual art, would have had too much to say to each other. Where Dalí flooded the world with ever more excessive, phantasmagorical paintings, prints and sculpture, Duchamp’s entire, pared-back oeuvre can be contained in one small room. Yet their critical standing is in inverse proportion to the amount they produced: Duchamp, who, as early as 1917, famously signed a urinal and called it art, is widely regarded as the most influential artist of the past century, while Dalí tends to be seen as a preposterous entertainer.
This exhibition plots an intricate course through the two artists’ respective oeuvres, documenting not only a close personal friendship – Dalí, Duchamp and their wives holidayed together annually for decades – but artistic paths that interweave in surprising ways.
Duchamp, born 1887, and at least Dalí’s equal as a self-mythologiser, liked to boast that he started out as an Impressionist and ran the gamut of early modern styles before abandoning painting at 25. The exhibition argues that Dalí (born 1904) pursued a near-identical trajectory a decade or so behind, and it brings together a strong collection of works to make the case. Duchamp’s extraordinary cubistic The King and Queen surrounded by Swift Nudes (1912) is the knockout, its mysterious multi-layered humanoid forms suggesting not so much a piece of oddball minor cubism, as such works tend to be viewed, but a surrealist painting a decade or more before the event. Beside it Dalí’s cascading Cubist Self-portrait (1923) looks like a piece of able but mannered student work, though his brooding proto-surreal Portrait of my Father (1925) knocks spots off Duchamp’s competent but slightly soulless portrait of his own father (1910).
These kind of geniuses-in-tandem shows inevitably become competitions about who was more radical and when. When the first work challenging traditional formats appears – the large, near-empty canvas of Untitled (1928)
– it turns out, surprisingly, to be by Dalí. The following year, however, he produced The First Days of Spring, his first foray into the slick, hyper-real fantasy manner he was to carry into risible self-parody over the following decades. While this would suggest a parting of the stylistic ways, a beautifully sinister room showcasing their shared obsession with perverse eroticism sees their sensibilities come close to merging into one.
If Duchamp’s “ready mades” – ordinary objects he designated art – such as the bottle rack, bicycle wheel and, of course, the urinal, tend to be thought of as coldly intellectual, this show presents them as also highly surreal and full of blatantly erotic connotations. Beside them, Dalí’s Surrealist Object functioning Symbolically – a plumbline hanging over one of his wife’s high-heeled shoes with lobster claws sticking out of it – is pure corn. But the curators have also dug out some really surprising Dalí works such as the unfathomable, near-abstract painting Fishermen in the Sun, and the all-too-comprehensible Anthropomorphic Beach, with its witty juxtaposition of finger and sponge.
If this show looked a touch dry and academic on paper, it brings together a terrific array of works by both artists, climaxing with two of their most famous respective works: Dalí’s Christ of St John of the Cross and Duchamp’s The Large Glass (a collection of fiercely inscrutable symbols spread over two hulking sheets of glass). If the Dalí was until relatively recently one of the world’s most famous modern works, and the Duchamp a quirky obscurity, that position has been reversed over the past couple of decades. Yet if Duchamp comes across as undoubtedly the greater artist, each of these great tricksters is intriguingly illuminated by the presence of the other. Duchamp appears as much more of a surrealist than you’d expect, Dalí more of a conceptualist, and an artist we underestimate at our peril.