Hello Dalí

Saw the Salvador Dalí exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art the other day. He was such a polymath—a much wider range of media and styles on display than the Surrealist greatest hits everyone knows. I was particularly struck by the influence of photography on his work, which in retrospect seems obvious, but he worked with very small brushes to achieve distinctive photorealistic detail—the Basket of Bread (1926) is a milestone here. Like the dream sequence he wrote twenty years later for Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945), Dalí saw realism rather than abstraction or impressionism as the skeleton key to his phantasmagoria. The sharp line of that wickedly waxed mustache became emblematic.