Toward Raphael

Surrealism was an old tired story when World War II outdated it for keeps. Some of Surrealist Salvador Dali's zany stunts were curiously prophetic of blast and ruin; today they seem tame compared with the actuality of bombs that can melt watches, toss armchairs into treetops and instantly disintegrate a man. Dali is showman enough to know it and he has taken a new tack--back toward Raphael.

This week his winning way with paint and reporters was making news once again; a Dali Madonna appeared on the cover of This Week magazine, to illustrate an interview with the new Dali by news-wise Art Critic Emily Genauer. Dali had painted the picture last summer at Port Lligat in Spain, showed it to Pope Pius XII last fall. The Pope, Dali said afterwards, showed, "extraordinary comprehension" of his effort.

The Port Lligat Madonna (see cut) was more traditional than appeared at first glance. The face of the Virgin looked like that of Dali's businesslike wife Gala, but he had given her a Raphaelesque pose, fixed her in a harshly geometrical composition and surrounded her with a Renaissance vocabulary of symbolic images. For example, the egg suspended from the scallop shell over her head was taken from a 15th Century Madonna by Piero della Francesca. The shell symbolized baptism, the egg, Resurrection.

But why did Dali poke holes in his figures and make everything float? "Modern physics," the artist explained with a twitch of his delicate handlebar mustache, "has revealed to us increasingly the dematerialization which exists in all nature and that is the reason why the material body of my Madonna does not exist and why in place of a torso you find a tabernacle 'filled with Heaven.' But while everything floating in space denotes spirituality it also represents our concept of the atomic system--today's counterpart of divine gravitation."

Dali emerged from the underbrush of ten-dollar words long enough to sneer knowingly at his contemporaries. "Modern artists are afraid because of their lack of technique," he said, "to face up to the dazzling perfection of the Renaissance . . . The Holy Mother of God is more important than a fruit bowl and a knife."

For all its Renaissance overtones and technical eclat, Dali's canvas did no honor to its great subject. Compared with the religious paintings of such consistent moderns as Georges Rouault and Henri Matisse, Dali's was approximately as chill and shallow as a bent watch.

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