Dalí the iceberg

By Olivia Weinberg

The Surrealists were wacky but Dalí was wackier. His paintings of wobbly clocks, oversized limbs, waiflike figures—half human, half chest of drawers—reveal less than a snippet of his imagination. “My painting is like an iceberg,” he once said, “which shows only a tenth of its volume.” Under the ice lurks an even more surreal Mr Dalí, and a new exhibition at the Pompidou Centre in Paris promises to dig deep.

A flamboyant exhibitionist, with a haughty expression, walking stick and freshly waxed moustache, Salvador Dalí carried with him an air of controversy. His work flutters between the disgusting and the filthy, the monstrous and the totally bonkers. Halfway between enchanting fairytales and gruesome horror stills, his paintings are packed tight with colour and symbolism. “The Persistence of Memory”, 1931 (above), is a prime example. His meticulous attention to detail and deliberate confusion transports us into a world of enhanced hyper-reality, a method he labelled “paranoiac critical”.