Catalogue Raisonne by Mike Barnes Read Free Book Online Page A

Dali’s waxed and curled moustaches and bulging eyes leapt out from other, milder faces. More like businessmen, most of them, to see them posed in their suits. Quotations on laminated white boards hung between the photographs. And more quotations – among them the one Neale had led off with – under the title “Literary Forbears and Confrères”. That sounded like Neale.
    My eye caught on some colour and I crossed the room. Mounted on another white board was a reproduction – a simple colour photocopy it looked like – of a fantasy head of a man composed of fruits and vegetables. “Summer”, I read from the label Jason had prepared. “Giuseppe Arcimboldi (1537-93), a forerunner of the Surrealists”. The Italian name and the vegetables – and maybe even something in the bulbous, large-nosed face – made me think of Piccone. But I wondered about the display itself. Hanging a photocopy, even a good one, seemed kind
of cheesy. Not like Neale, really. Again I wondered: What comment was he trying to make about the show or the gallery? Or about himself, even?
    In the inner Braithwaite Gallery, it was Dali again that jumped out at me. “Auto-eroticism of the Didact Amid Hypertrophic Forms” showed a voluptuous girl staked out in one of Dali’s deserts, her wrists and ankles bound by rubbery tendrils. The hypertrophic forms were shiny and tubular and globular, like engorged metallic penises and breasts and buttocks, hanging above her in sections, poised. In the distance, small spiky machines, or mechanistic spined animals, advanced in a column towards her. It looked like soft porn with a hard twist of whimsy. Vargas on peyote, say. I liked it as such, without seeing much more in it. 1957, said the label.
    Back out at the entrance to the show, just inside the MacMahon Gallery, I wondered about that date. 1957. I’d heard someone – Walter probably – describe surrealism as a movement that flourished between the wars. Shouldn’t that have put the Dali painting twenty years beyond the pale? And thinking about that, I remembered a short conversation I’d heard between Neale and Walter earlier in the day.
    One of the advantages to being a “statue” was that people often talked in front of you as if you weren’t there. You heard things. Like this little exchange between the director and the curator. Which, like most of their exchanges, seemed to center on a kind of barbed in-joke. And on some kind of subterranean agreement and disagreement, both at the same time.
    â€œPaintings done by some surrealists,” Neale had said.
    And Walter had replied, a bit tartly, “There’s only so much scholarship the local market will bear.”
    Put together with the Dali date, the meaning of the exchange, which had been murky at the time, came into sharper focus. It was about the title of the show: “Secrets of the Surrealists”. That implied they were key works. But maybe – by Neale’s comment – they weren’t at all. Maybe they were minor works done by artists who, at one time or another, not necessarily by virtue of the work in this show, had been labelled surrealists. It was a sly title that way. Secrets . Which ones? And I wondered who had come up with it.

    Budget constraints – cruel and inexplicable cutbacks by various Councils – meant that a lot of the gallery’s shows had to be organized around dubious principles. Art of Montreal. The Prairie Eye. When the only real principle operating was: This Is What We Could Get. Every show could have been titled that. In his bitterer moments, I’d heard Walter admit as much.
    On the far side of the title panel, under locked glass on a sculpture pedestal, was a chess set carved by Max Ernst. Detaching it from its present context, you saw some lumpy shapes with the occasional more refined curlicue or bulb. The start of a retirement project, say, or a week in