Birds of a Feather

...Dali has lately discovered Op art and his paintings are now fitted out with optical embellishments-moir?© patterns and an Op-type painting that has been hoisted bodily into one of his large Dali-DeMille extravaganzas...

...It is strange to think that 30 years from now, Dali, with his anarchic sexuality, and Magritte, with his more pedestrian approach, might be considered the conservators of values they had originally intended to subvert...

...Both came under the influence of the metaphysical paintings of Giorgio de Chirico at early stages in their careers...

...In 1930 Magritte, temperamentally unsuited to the polemics of the Surrealist camp, returned to the settled atmosphere of Brussels where he continued to paint while living the life of an inconspicuous bourgeois...

...Except for the period of the German occupation, when he made an apparently unsuccessful attempt to paint in the manner of Renoir, he has stuck to the business of not so much showing reality as showing it up...

...Chirico," Magritte has remarked, "was the first to dream of what must be painted and not how to paint...

...Especially in the paintings executed during his American residence in World War II, Dali's iconography is replete with coke-bottles, telephones, American bombers and baseball players...

...Both artists had their first one-man showings in America in the early '30s at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York...

...He has been a tireless painter, publicity seeker, writer, and promoter of his own virtues...

...At every turn, Magritte seems bound by the program he read into de Chirico's examplethe need for "poetry's ascendancy over painting and the various manners of painting...

...There are, to be sure, a number of urgent erotic appeals at work in Magritte's paintings, but they are dispatched in an efficient and pedantic manner with none of Dali's ambivalent and Baroque ingenuity...

...Magritte arrived in the French artistic capital in 1927 and was promptly indoctrinated into the movement under the tutelage of Andr?© Breton and Paul Eluard...

...Esthetically, Dali and Magritte are not at odds...

...His huge paintings on historic, religious and metaphysical themes are set up like so many reverential altars in Glasgow, Washington, and New York, drawing admiring crowds year after year...

...Magritte's whole career seems to have been conducted with the singlemindedness and circumspection of a thrifty shop-keeper...

...While all this might seem like Macy's and Gimbels confronting each other across New York's West Side in a Surrealist event, that is not the case...

...Loaves of dry, crusty bread in a straw basket, a piece of cork hanging from a string, a simple composition of a sprig of leaves and a carnation lying on a cloth of gold, are painted with a meticulous and eerie realism that not only demonstrates an extraordinary facility but provides the necessarily innocent context for a painter who wants to go on to produce the shock value of sodomized virgins, soft watches and limp pianos...

...As young men, both Dali and Magritte were drawn to Paris and, more especially, to the bizarre and frenzied activities of the Surrealists...

...One gets the impression that Dali is inordinately sensitive to his competition, whether alive or dead, and that he takes more than the usual interest in any well-publicized newcomer...

...The exhibition, selected by the artist, includes more than 250 paintings, drawings, objets d'art, and jewelled mechanical sculptures, occupying all of the gallery's exhibition space...

...Magritte's hero, unlike Dali's youths in their naked prowess, is the stiff bourgeois in his derby hat and black Chesterfield, a diffident observer on the scene who does not take an active part...

...In Magritte's world, personal values, which is also the title of the painting, are reduced (and magnified) to a pocket-comb, a kitchen match, a pill, and a water glass that have expanded to the size of a room...

...Yet Dali has never been content to leave his paintings to their own startling formal devices or to their displays of painterly virtuosity...

...Dali became acquainted with de Chirico's painting in 1923, while still a rambunctious student in his native Spain...

...Having taken up Op, however, he has done it on a cosmological scale, by way of establishing his divine right to the technique, one supposes...

...Rene Magritte's retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art is not on a scale to compete with the Dali exhibition either in its range or its metaphysical expertise...

...Like some restless Avignon pope, he has issued manifestoes that read like papal bulls and blessed his paintings with titles that have an encyclical authority-The Chromosomes of a Highly-colored Fish's Eye Starting the Harmonious Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory, for example, or The Maximum Speed of Raphael's Madonna...

...There the correspondence ends...

...Leering and mustachioed, he shows up endlessly in the mass media...

...He has also assimilated, with a speed that is breathtaking, almost every successful venture in contemporary art...

...Less given to the flashiness and daring of Dali's excursions into the non-rational, Magritte has also been spared the failures and the flaccid nonsense of his Spanish contemporary...

...Yet he is a substantial painter...

...It is the balmy climate of Pop art which now provides such perfect roosting weather for these two Surrealists...

...They are, in fact, birds of a feather come home to roost...

...When the history of content in modern art comes to be written-a document to be set beside the formoriented discussions that now prevail-both Dali and Magritte (and the Surrealists in general) should form a consequential chapter in that picaresque account...

...Magritte, while a struggling young artist in Brussels in 1922, saw a reproduction of de Chirico's The Song of Love and thereafter considered the Italian painter the greatest of contemporary artists...

...The example of de Chirico's work, with its isolated objects and stark perspectives, has continued to be a fructifying influence in Magritte's oeuvre...

...Although traces of de Chirico crop up in the Spaniard's painting, Dali has never been the type of artist to be abjectly or humbly devoted to any contemporary...

...It is clear from the current exhibition that Dali has done more than invent a few tricks...

...The Surrealists first created a shock by the irreverent nature of their subject matter...

...In the current exhibition there are even a few shaped canvases and a painting with a blown-up image in halftone dots that predates Roy Lichtenstein's technique by a few years...

...Dali's ambitions were at least worldwide, if not cosmic, in their scope...

...Gesture, inflection, the spontaneity of surface effects have been withheld...

...Dali copped the further prize of Gala Eluard, the poet's wife, whom he subsequently married and who became the ubiquitous, nearly mythological, subject of his later paintings...

...Narcisse during the Napoleonic Wars, and, of course, Salvador Dali, who has tied up all these loose historic ends to produce a "new illusionist and paralyzing realism" that will, no doubt, save painting in our time...

...His latest manifesto, included in the catalogue to the exhibition, is a preposterous bit of rationalization that involves Vermeer, Leeuwenhoek's development of the microscope, the steroscopic eyesight of the ordinary housefly, a miraculous plague of flies that issued from the dead body of St...

...The same reserve is evident in Magritte's handling of painterly values...

...Excommunicated from orthodox Surrealism in 1934 by the Pope of the movement, Andr?© Breton, he set out to bring Surrealism, profitably, to the masses...

...Both artists benefitted measurably from the Surrealist irrationale which formed the basis of their later work and reputations...

...Up to a point, the histories of the two artists are remarkably alike...

...There are a number of very competent early Miros included in his exhibition, as well as an attempt at jousting with the paint brush in the manner of the French abstractionist, Georges Mathieu...

...Magritte, the Belgian Surrealist, is more economically installed in a retrospective of 82 paintings at the Museum of Modern Art...

...Then, as the course of modern art turned to other, more formal directions, they produced a milder frisson by resolutely sticking with the figure while the art that "counted" went increasingly abstract...

...What is striking in Dali's exhibition is not the staginess, nor the perverse and involved sexuality, nor the philosophical bombast, but the fact that underneath the wellgroomed wolf's skin there is buried a sober and more proficient Magritte-a painter of old-fashioned, superreal still lifes that rival Vermeer and Velasquez...

...In Dali's case, there is some justice to his flapping descent upon the New York art scene...

...In The Idol, a granite bird hovers over a mauve seascape...

...Aside from his capacity for making good copy, there are certain zany elements in Dali's paintings over the years which could easily join up with (if they did not hatch) our full-fledged Pop movement with its publicity-minded brood...

...In Portrait, a suspicious eye stares out of a ham steak on a plate in a still-life that is otherwise a model of rectitude...

...Dali, on his second visit to Paris in 1928, was introduced to the circle of Surrealist painters and poets by his compatriot, Miro...

...I suspect that it is the sexual content of Surrealist art and its unique dependence upon the human body (and the world of associations that goes with it) that has performed this salvaging operation...

...Dali, the international playboy and remittance man of the Surrealist movement, has spread out his wares in Huntington Hartford's Gallery of Modern Art...