One Fine Show: ‘Dalí, Disruption and Devotion’ at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Welcome to One Fine Show, where Observer highlights a recently opened show at a museum outside New York City, a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.

This year marked the 100th anniversary of André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto and the birth of the movement itself. It has also seen Leonora Carrington’s Les Distractions de Dagobert (1945) sell for $28.5 million at the big spring auctions in New York. Pair all this with the revived popularity of Sigmund Freud and the current presidential election, and you could make the case that our times are even more surreal than the ones in which the manifesto made its debut.

Riding that wave at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, is “Dalí: Disruption and Devotion,” an exhibition of Salvador Dalí that seeks to pull the artist out of this somewhat wacky context of the movement and place him in a broader art historical context. The show features nearly thirty paintings and works on paper on loan from the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, and books and prints from a private collection, all of which are paired with works from the MFA’s European collection to show the influence of artists like Diego Velázquez, El Greco and Francisco Goya on Dalí’s works.

I was surprised to learn of Dalí’s Cubist period at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía recently, not only because the style wasn’t a fit but because the artist never seemed to be one for trends. Placing him in the broader framework of painting makes much more sense and allows you to appreciate him past the conceptual level. Technically, Dalí wasn’t quite at the level of René Magritte or Max Ernst, but is still worthy of that kind of appreciation—we don’t just love that the clocks are melting, we enjoy how they melt.

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Dalí had great admiration for Velázquez, who as a court painter was something of his predecessor in café society. This show presents the later artist’s highly conceptual piece Velázquez Painting the Infanta Margarita with the Lights and Shadows of His Own Glory (1958) alongside the original, Infanta Maria Theresa (1653). For his version, Dalí has covered the future wife of Louis XIV with swirling gloom and razors of light that feel borrowed from Blade Runner. There is, too, the silhouette of a little man, though one doubts that Dalí thought of himself or Velázquez as anything but titanic.

Also on display are four of Dalí reinterpretations of Goya’s Los Caprichos prints, which add color and a cartoonish sensibility to them and continue the similar, vague poetry of the titles. Goya’s He cannot make her out even this way (1799) depicts a fellow with a monocle examining a maja while onlookers seem amused. Dalí’s interpretation, He pesters them like this (1973-1977), adds a sickly pink look to the humans and a yellowish landscape that would seem to heighten the perversion.

But Dalí is at his best when he’s most complicated, and that word definitely describes his ten-foot tall Ecumenical Council (1960): an homage to seemingly every religious painting in existence, with the artist himself in the corner Bob Ross-style, painting a blank canvas. It’s impossible not to see a forecast of text-to-image A.I. in its pastiche blurriness. It takes a great deal of wisdom to act this crazy.

“Dalí: Disruption and Devotion” is on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, through December 1.