Salvador Dalí

1904 (Figueras (Espagne)) / 1989 (Figueras (Espagne))

The retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in 1980 may have set a record for attendance - never before surpassed in Paris - by welcoming a million visitors in five months, but since his death Dalí's work has been reviled by the intelligentsia. The orthodox surrealists superbly ignore all that he realized before his allegiance to Breton in 1929, the academics condemn to the vilest kitschery the "quintessential pompierism" of his senseless post-war chromos, while the admirers of his talent are saddened by his multiple advertising and television clowneries. However, a growing number of contemporary artists express their indebtedness to the conquest of the irrational undertaken by the Catalan magician and their admiration for his popular practices, which allow the expression of a total work of art in a new world of images. So Dalí: new Raphael or nothing?







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