03/25/04 - Salvador Dali exhibition shows a surrealist limning his destiny
Catherine Fox

Don Quixote is a recurring theme in the work of Salvador Dali. Perhaps the Spanish artist felt a certain kinship with his fictional countryman. After all, the befuddled knight was a victim of his hallucinations, and the cagey artist was the beneficiary of his.

As adept as drawing attention to himself as he was at drawing images, Dali came to be seen as surrealism incarnate in the '30s. His melting watches, weird rocky landscapes and women with hourglass figures are the stuff of dorm-room posters. His later religious paintings, hovering between classicism and kitsch, were just as popular.

This year is the centenary of Dali's birth, and Atlanta has been celebrating. 7 Stages' play "Lobster Alice" imagined the famous surrealist artist's short-lived collaboration at Walt Disney's animation studios, and "Destino," the fruit of that effort, is playing at Landmark's Midtown Art Cinema.

Now comes an exhibition of prints at Skot Foreman Gallery. Late in life, Dali sullied his career and his market by signing thousands of blank sheets of paper that were used to make forged prints. But he was prolific even when he made the prints himself, and the exhibition suggests the range of his interests.

The pieces that most closely resemble the Freud-inspired dream imagery of his high surrealist period are frequently the least interesting because Dali seems to have drawn from his archive rather than his subconscious. The melting clocks in the lithograph "Tear of Time" were pulled right out of his famous painting, "Persistence of Memory." But, executed during the year of his death in 1989, they do take on a personal poignancy as a reference to his own life slipping away.

As the Quixote works might suggest, Dali didn't spend all his time holed up in his id. He held a wide-ranging dialogue with literature and theater. The show includes illustrations of Dante's "Inferno," the stories of La Fontaine and "Hamlet." And while he frequently employed the manipulation of scale of his paintings, he forsook their realism for a variety of effects. He employs a scribbly, energetic line here, watercolor-like washes there. He composes figures out of columns of straight lines, or suggests them with blots and marks.

Dali was at his best in the early years of surrealism. A lot of the prints here ride on his cachet. Still, the gallery installation — augmented by biographical videos, including tapes of this performance artist's antics, and the didactic wall of reproductions of his more famous paintings — broadens one's understanding of one of the most flamboyant art-world personalities of the 20th century.

EXHIBIT REVIEW "Salvador Dali: 100 Years" Through April 18. $1,000-$15,000. 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Mondays-Saturdays. Skot Foreman Fine Art, 315 Peters St., Atlanta. 404-222-0440. The verdict: There's more to Salvador Dali than melting watches.