Surrealist Painter Describes Modern Art As Being “Punk”

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 13, Issue 76, 11 April 1949, Page 7

Surrealist Painter Describes Modern Art As Being “Punk”

The surrealist painter Salvador Dali, who has startled the public for many years, reaffirms that mo, dern abstract art is punk. Declaring his apostasy in a mixture of Catalonian Spanish, menu French and mangled English, Dali said:—

. “Abstract art ees incapable of expressing beeg ideas of philosophy.” In his suite at St. Regis Hotel, where he stays in New York, the 44-years-old Spanish artist said: “If for my home I am asked to choose between a Persian carpet and a Picasso painting I’d choose the rug.

“I rank Picasso as oiie of our period’s great geniuses, but he had mastered the art of painting before he took to his abstractions. “Picasso’s abstract followers are such lazy, good-for-nothing hams they shouldn’t be allowed to paint a moustache on a toothpaste advertisement.”

“These abstractioners. Zut! They ought to be designing wallpaper,” he declared.

Dali, who has painted men with exploding torsos, continued: “As long as an artist paints in traditional form he can paint the most fantastic subjects. “The world is just now catching up with me—l was painting atomic fission 20 years before she happened.”

That explains the exploding men. “Atomic-age reality ees far more fantastic than anything I ever paint,” he added. “The world’s craziness has surpassed Dali’s craziness,”