The computer (as a graphic tool) is relatively new in the current rush of technology. In America, widespread use of the computer dates approximately from 1955, when a line of commercial units first became available.

In 1963 computers began to develop possibilities for making graphics. An electric microfilm recorder was introduced; it can plot points and draw lines a million times faster than a human draftsman. This machine and the electronic computer which controls it thus make feasible various kinds of graphic movies which heretofore would have been prohibitively intricate, time-consuming and expensive.

The microfilm recorder consists essentially of a display tube and a camera. It understands only simple instructions such as those for advancing the film, displaying a spot or alphabetic character at specified coordinates or drawing a straight line from one point to another. Though this repertoire is simple, the machine can compose complicated pictures—or series of pictures—from a large number of basic elements: it can draw ten thousand to one hundred thousand points, lines or characters per second.

This film-exposing device is therefore fast enough to tum out, in a matte r of seconds , a television-quality image consisting of a fine mosaic of closely spaced spots, or to produce simple line drawings at rates of several frames per second.

As a technically oriented film-artist , I realized the possibilities of the computer as a new graphic tool for film-making in 1964 and began my exploration of this medium. I have since made nine computer-generated films. To produce these films the following procedure was used: an IBM 7094 computer was loaded with a set of sub-routines (instructions) which perform the operations for computizing the movie system called “Beflix” devised by Ken Knowlton of Bell Telephone Laboratories. The movie computer program is then written, in this special language, and put on punched cards; the punched cards are then fed into the computer; the computer tabulates and accepts the instructions on the cards calculating the explicit details of each implied picture of the movie and putting the results of this calculation on tape. To visualize this: imagine a mosaic-like screen with 252 x 184 points of light each point of light can be turned on or off from instructions on the program. Pictures can be thought of as an array of spots of different shades of gray. The computer keeps a complete “map” of the picture as the spots are turned on and off. The programmer instructs the system to “draw” lines, arcs, lettering. He can also invoke operations on entire areas with instructions for copying, shifting, transliterating, zooming, and dissolving and filling areas. The coded tape is then put into another machine that reads the tape and instructs a graphic display device (a Stromberg-Carlson 4020), which is a sophisticated cathode-tube system similar to a TV picture tube. Each point of light turns on/off according to the computerized instructions on the tape. A camera over the tube, also instructed when to take a picture by information from the computer, then records on film that particular movie frame. After much trial and error—during which time the computer informs you that you have not written your instructions properly—you have a black-and-white movie. This is edited in traditional movie techniques, and color is added by a special color-printing process developed by artists Bob Brown and Frank Olvey.

Movie-making was for long the most revolutionary art form of our time. Now television touches the nerve-ends of all the world; the visual revolution sits in just about every living room across America. The image revolution that movies represented has now been overhauled by the television evolution, and is approaching the next visual stage-to computer graphics to computer controls of environment to a new cybernetic “movie art.”

For the artist the new media of movies, TV, computers, cybernetics, are tools that have curved the perspectives of vision, curving both outward and inward. The revolution of ideas and the ecology of the senses began in 1900 (movies were “invented” about the same time as psychoanalysis). Trace the path of ideas of painting over the past sixty years: the breakup of nineteenth-century ideals, step by step; the obj et d’art to nonobjective art; cubism-simultaneous perception; futurism—motion and man machine metaphysics; dadaism-anti-art, pro-life; surrealism—the dream as the center of the mental universe; action painting—synthetic time-motion; happenings—two-dimensional painting comes off the wall; op art-illusion as retinal “reality”; pop art” reality” as reminder of reality; minimal art-illusion of reduction; conceptual art-the elements of illusion.

In other words, we have been moving closer to a “mental” state of art/life. Now we move into the area of computers, an extension of the mind with a tool technically as responsive as ourselves. In the developing mental art/life, to “think” about the work is the process of doing the work.

An abstract notation system for making movies and image storage and retrieval systems opens a door for a kind of mental attitude of movie-making: the artist is no longer restricted to the exact execution of the form; so long as he is clear in his mind as to what he wants, eventually he can realize his movie or work on some computer, somewhere.

What shall this black box, this memory system of the world, this meta-physical printing press do for us? Compare the computer to driving a fast sports car; it is difficult to control; although the irony is that at higher speeds less effort is needed to alter and change directions. However, more skill—a complex man/machine understanding—is required.

The future of computers in art will be fantastic, as amplifiers of human imagination and responses, of kinetic environments programmed to each of our interests; in short, computers will shape the overall ecology of America.

It’s not very far from the Gutenberg press of movable bits of type to the logic “bits” of the computer. No doubt computers will be as common as telephones in our lives; art schools in the near future will teach programming as one of the new psycho-skills of the new technician-artist-citizen.

Whereas fame and fortune in the art world come from restricting access to an elite few, making it as a digital creator is about giving away as much of yourself as possible. For free, all the time.

“My attitude’s always been, as soon as I post something on the internet, that’s out there,” Winkelmann said. “The internet is an organism. It just eats things and poops them out in new ways, and trying to police that is futile. People take my stuff and upload it and profit from it. They get all the engagements and clicks and whatnot. But whatever.”

Winkelmann leveraged his two million followers and became the face of NFTs. In the process, he became a blue-chip art star, with an eponymous art museum in South Carolina and pieces reportedly selling for close to $10 million to major museums elsewhere. That’s without an MFA, a gallery, or prior exhibitions.

“You can have [a contemporary] artist who is extremely well-selling and making a shitload of money, and the vast majority of people have never heard of this person,” he said. “Their artwork has no effect on the broader visual language of the time. And yet, because they’ve convinced the right few people, they can be successful. I think in the future, more people will come up like I did—by convincing a million normal people.”

In 2021 he might have been right, but more recently that path to art world fame is being threatened by a potent force: artificial intelligence. Last year, Midjourney and Stability AI turned the world of digital creators on its head when they released AI image generators to the public. Both now boast more than 10 million users. For digital artists, the technology represents lost jobs and stolen labor. The major image generators were trained by scraping billions of images from the internet, including countless works by digital artists who never gave their consent.

In the eyes of those artists, tech companies have unleashed a machine that scrambles human—and legal—definitions of forgery to such an extent that copyright may never be the same. And that has big implications for artists of all kinds.

In December, Canadian illustrator and content creator Sam Yang received a snide email from a stranger asking him to judge a sort of AI battle royale in which he could decide which custom artificial intelligence image generator best mimicked his own style. In the months since Stability AI released the Stable Diffusion generator, AI enthusiasts had rejiggered the tool to produce images in the style of specific artists; all they needed was a sample of a hundred or so images. Yang, who has more than three million followers across YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter, was an obvious target.

Netizens took hundreds of his drawings posted online to train the AI to pump out images in his style: girls with Disney-wide eyes, strawberry mouths, and sharp anime-esque chins. “I couldn’t believe it,” Yang said. “I kept thinking, This is really happening … and it’s happening to me.”

Yang trawled Reddit forums in an effort to understand how anyone could think it was OK to do this, and kept finding the same assertion: there was no need to contact artists for permission. AI companies had already scraped the digital archives of thousands of artists to train the image generators, the Redditors reasoned. Why couldn’t they?

Like many digital artists, Yang has been wrestling with this question for months. He doesn’t earn a living selling works in rarefied galleries, auction houses, and fairs, but instead by attracting followers and subscribers to his drawing tutorials. He doesn’t sell to collectors, unless you count the netizens who buy his T-shirts, posters, and other merchandise. It’s a precarious environment that has gotten increasingly treacherous.

“AI art seemed like something far down the line,” he said, “and then it wasn’t.”

Yang never went to a lawyer, as the prospect of fighting an anonymous band of Redditors in court was overwhelming. But other digital artists aren’t standing down so easily. In January, several filed a class action lawsuit targeted at Stability AI, Midjourney, and the image-sharing platform DeviantArt.

Brooklyn-based illustrator Deb JJ Lee is one of those artists. By January, Lee was sick and tired of being overworked and undervalued. A month earlier, Lee had gone viral after posting a lowball offer from Epic Games to do illustration work for the company’s smash hit Fortnite, arguably the most popular video game in the world. Epic, which generated over $6 billion last year, offered $3,000 for an illustration and ownership of the copyright. For Lee, it was an all-too-familiar example of the indignities of working as a digital artist. Insult was added to injury when an AI enthusiast—who likely found out about Lee from the viral post—released a custom model based on Lee’s work.

“I’ve worked on developing my skills my whole life and they just took it and made it to zeros and ones,” Lee said. “Illustration rates haven’t kept up with inflation since the literal 1930s.”

Illustration rates have stagnated and, in some cases, shrunk since the ’80s, according to Tim O’Brien, a former president of the Society of Illustrators. The real money comes from selling usage rights, he said, especially to big clients in advertising. Lee continued, “I know freelancers who are at the top of their game that are broke, I’m talking [illustrators who do] New Yorker covers. And now this?”

Lee reached out to their community of artists and, together, they learned that the image generators, custom or not, were trained on the LAION dataset, a collection of 5.6 billion images scraped, without permission, from the internet. Almost every digital artist has images in LAION, given that DeviantArt and ArtStation were lifted wholesale, along with Getty Images and Pinterest.

The artists who filed suit claim that the use of these images is a brazen violation of intellectual property rights; Matthew Butterick, who specializes in AI and copyright, leads their legal team. (Getty Images is pursuing a similar lawsuit, having found 12 million of their images in LAION.) The outcome of the case could answer a legal question at the center of the internet: in a digital world built on sharing, are tech companies entitled to everything we post online?

The class action lawsuit is tricky. While it might seem obvious to claim copyright infringement, given that billions of copyrighted images were used to create the technology underlying image generators, the artists’ lawyers are attempting to apply existing legal standards made to protect and restrict human creators, not a borderline-science-fiction computing tool. To that end, the complaint describes a number of abuses: First, the AI training process, called diffusion, is suspect because it requires images to be copied and re-created as the model is tested. This alone, the lawyers argue, constitutes an unlicensed use of protected works.

From this understanding, the lawyers argue that image generators essentially call back to the dataset and mash together millions of bits of millions of images to create whatever image is requested, sometimes with the explicit instruction to recall the style of a particular artist. Butterick and his colleagues argue that the resulting product then is a derivative work, that is, a work not “significantly transformed” from its source material, a key standard in “fair use,” the legal doctrine underpinning much copyright law.

As of mid-April, when Art in America went to press, the courts had made no judgment in the case. But Butterick’s argument irks technologists who take issue with the suit’s description of image generators as complicated copy-paste tools.

“There seems to be this fundamental misunderstanding of what machine learning is,” Ryan Murdock, a developer who has been working on the technology since 2017, including for Adobe, said. “It’s true that you want to be able to recover information from the images and the dataset, but the whole point of machine learning is not to memorize or compress images but to learn higher-level general information about what an image is.”

Diffusion, the technology undergirding image generators, works by adding random noise, or static, to an image in the dataset, Murdock explained. The model then attempts to fill in the missing parts of the image using hints from a text caption that describes the work, and those captions sometimes refer to an artist’s name. The model’s efforts are then scored based on how accurately the model was able to fill in the blanks, leading it to contain some information associating style and artist. AI enthusiasts working under the name Parrot Zone have completed more than 4,000 studies testing how many artist names the model recognizes. The count is close to 3,000, from art historical figures like Wassily Kandinsky to popular digital artists like Greg Rutkowski.

The class action suit aims to protect human artists by asserting that, because an artist’s name is invoked in the text prompt, an AI work can be considered “derivative” even if the work produced is the result of pulling content from billions of images. In effect, the artists and their lawyers are trying to establish copyright over style, something that has never before been legally protected.

The most analogous recent copyright case involves fine artists debating just that question. Last fall, well-known collage artist Deborah Roberts sued artist Lynthia Edwards and her gallerist, Richard Beavers, accusing Edwards of imitating her work and thus confusing potential collectors and harming her market. Attorney Luke Nikas, who represents Edwards, recently filed a motion to dismiss the case, arguing that Roberts’s claim veered into style as opposed to the forgery of specific elements of her work.

“You have to give the court a metric to judge against,” Nikas said. “That means identifying specific creative choices, which are protected, and measuring that against the supposedly derivative work.”

Ironically, Nikas’s argument is likely to be the one used by Stability AI and Midjourney against the digital artists. Additionally, the very nature of the artists’ work as content creators makes assessing damages a tough job. As Nikas described, a big part of arguing copyright cases entails convincing a judge that the derivative artwork has meaningfully impacted the plaintiff’s market, such as the targeting of a specific collecting class.

In the end, it could be the history of human-made art that empowers an advanced computing tool: copyright does not protect artistic style so that new generations of artists can learn from those who came before, or remix works to make something new. In 2012 a federal judge famously ruled that Richard Prince did not violate copyright in incorporating a French photographer’s images into his “Canal Zone” paintings, to say nothing of the long history of appropriation art practiced by Andy Warhol, Barbara Kruger, and others. If humans can’t get in trouble for that, why should AI?

In mid-March, the United States Copyright Office released a statement of policy on AI-generated works, ruling that components of a work made using AI were not eligible for copyright. This came as a relief to artists who feared that their most valuable asset—their usage rights—might be undermined by AI. But the decision also hinders the court’s ability to determine how artists are being hurt financially by AI image generators. Quantifying damages online is tricky.

Late last year, illustrator and graphic novelist Tomer Hanuka discovered that someone had created a custom model based on his work, and was selling an NFT collection titled “Punks by Hanuka” on the NFT marketplace OpenSea. But Hanuka had no idea whom to contact; such scenarios usually involve anonymous users who disappear as soon as trouble strikes.

“I can’t speak to what they did exactly because I don’t know how to reach them and I don’t know who they are,” Hanuka said. “They don’t have any contact or any leads on their page.” The hurt, he said, goes deeper than run-of-the-mill online theft. “You develop this language that can work with many different projects because you bring something from yourself into the equation, a piece of your soul that somehow finds an angle, an atmosphere. And then this [AI-generated art] comes along. It’s passable, it sells. It doesn’t just replace you but it also muddies what you’re trying to do, which is to make art, find beauty. It’s really the opposite of that.”

For those who benefited from that brief magical window when a creator could move more easily from internet to art world fame, new tools offer a certain convenience. With his new jet-setting life, visiting art fairs and museums around the world, Winkelmann has found a way to continue posting an online illustration a day, keeping his early fans happy by letting AI make the menial time-consuming imagery in the background.

This is exactly what big tech promised AI would do: ease the creative burden that, relatively speaking, a creator might see as not all that creative. Besides, he points out, thieving companies are nothing new. “The idea of, like, Oh my god, a tech company has found a way to scrape data from us and profit from it––what are we talking about? That’s literally been the last 20 years,” he said. His advice to up-and-coming digital artists is to do what he did: use the system as much as possible, and lean in.

That’s all well and good for Winkelmann: He no longer lives in the precarious world
of working digital artists. Beeple belongs to the art market now.  

As with most of his works, a voiceover accompanies the dance. It has a narrative that doubles as prompts for the dancers, but also bleeds into the realm of description. This comes naturally for Núñez, who is visually impaired, though he also includes a separate, live audio description track conceived specifically for blind audiences. For The Square, Núñez, who was born and raised in Costa Rica and is currently a fellow at Princeton University, instructs his dancers to feel the elements, the vibrations of their ancestors, and their third eye. He sounds more like a yoga instructor than a ballet master, encouraging dancers to listen to their bodies rather than dominate them. He wants them to get into a trance.

Núñez says he is unlearning his training in the school of German expressionism as typified by Pina Bausch; in that context, he was taught that to dance is to suffer, an attitude he regards as both Western and ableist. When his dancers generate momentum, they’re instructed to let the energy carry them where it may—a method he describes as decidedly decolonial. Rotations and undulations mark his choreography, dancers revolving around one another as they move, their spines billowing like inchworms. Núñez said his “vortex” method evolved from his trouble judging distances: when everyone rotates around one point, it helps him predict their positions to avoid collisions.

The Square has a score by Alfonso “Poncho” Castro, who uses indigenous Central American instruments like the carraca, basically, a donkey jaw modified by ants; the insects slowly remove the flesh and loosen the teeth. Played with a stick, the carraca produces a sound that Poncho mixes electronically to intone at 432 hertz, “the frequency of the universe,” as Núñez describes it. He presents the frequency as a gift to both the dancers and the audience, saying it “automatically invites people to rest.”

Despite all this, Núñez insists his practice is not one of healing. “I want to nurture and energize my body,” he said, “but I also love this state of feeling the wounds.” He added that, “in marginalized communities, when you are communicating to the world that you are healing, you risk removing the responsibility from all the oppressive structures.” His nuanced approach to the dynamic is a sort of extension of his “vortex” method, with a focus on neither nurturing nor wounds but, rather, both, swirling together. 

In a time when so many artists dabble in video, Nguyen-Chi stands apart for her mastery of cinematic storytelling. Like a true filmmaker, she collaborates with skilled cinematographers and musicians in beautifully shot works built around compelling narrative structures. In Violet Belly, her mother is onscreen telling her story, so it’s understood that she survived, but we’re never told how—just left suspended in blue.

Before studying at Germany’s famed art school Städelschule, Nguyen-Chi, now based in Berlin, worked for a Swiss NGO helping people exposed to Agent Orange. Violet Belly completes a trilogy that deals with Cold War history from her Vietnamese and German perspective. All three personal, poetic videos ensconce viewers in a blue expanse, and she plays with modes of display. When she showed Violet Belly last year in a former refugee center in Amsterdam, now an art space called de Appel, Nguyen-Chi shoved a large, jagged mirror through a slanted projection screen. One evening, a musician performed a live version of the soundtrack on a cello as the projection danced across her instrument. 

This summer, Nguyen-Chi will cover the floor of Norway’s Kunsthall Trondheim with hundreds of ping-pong balls, where she will show two works from the trilogy together for the first time. A mirrored game table will bounce the light from video projectors instead of balls, in reference to Cold War “ping-pong diplomacy.”

Meanwhile, Nguyen-Chi is at work on a new trilogy about three Vietnamese women: her mother (once again) plus an activist and a filmmaker. She said that each of them “embodies some form of resistance, and defines their own freedom despite limitations.” She has borrowed footage left behind by the filmmaker, who documented the Vietnam War, some of it literally drenched in blood. Nguyen-Chi is an artist who handles haunting stories without reducing or sensationalizing them, so it’s hard to imagine such delicate material in better hands. 

Related Articles

From the Archives: Experimental Filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek on the Computer's Emergence as a Creative Tool 

Disabled Choreographer Christopher Unpezverde Núñez Is Skeptical of "Healing"

Tsai was in town this past February for the opening of her first solo exhibition in the United States, “A Mirror for the Romantic,” at Tara Downs gallery, where the London-based artist was surrounded by her own painted abstractions. Her work in pencil and oils invites us to wander between marks that boomerang freely across the canvas, with hard-edged lines and brisk smudges wending through eddies of flamboyant color. Her compositions are dense and seemingly limitless in dimension. They sweep you up in their relentless fervor.

Tsai describes herself as a narrator of motions, with a special concern for “the tension of searching back and forth.” This dynamic registers in her gestures’ trajectories, which morph wildly and resolve into harmony. Although her paintings offer no clear stories, they are as eventful as any drama. Word without End I Saw (2022) is a riotous encounter of pastel daubs that flit around a wispy spiral of purple, with exacting curves and ciphers subtly punctuating the chaos. Looking at the verdant First Day of Four Day Interlude (2023) feels like a fit of spring fever.

Tsai, 24, draws influences from lyrical texts of traditional Chinese literature, in particular the classic epic novel Dream of the Red Chamber, written in the 1750s by Cao Xueqin. Growing up in a large family in Taiwan, she was attracted to the book’s story about the rise and decline of a royal family and its evocation of imagery and metaphors to delineate complex interpersonal relationships. Her ongoing fascination with the 120-chapter tale’s “ever-changing process of beauty and ugliness, temperance and obscenity, refinement and vulgarity,” as she put it, materializes in her approach to mark-making. She often begins by piling up paint on the edges of her canvas and then spreading it across the surface, drawing over certain layers, and obfuscating others with gesso. When she describes this process, she uses words like “distort,” “destroy,” and “re-create.”

This method of working laterally stems from Tsai’s training in gongbi, a realist style of traditional Chinese ink painting that she studied in high school. She adapted her skill in executing fine yet fluid brushstrokes in oil paint at the Taipei National University of the Arts, but turned to abstraction at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, where she received her MFA in 2022.

She was, and remains, interested in pushing spatial relationships and seeking layered emotional states: just as the diction and rhythm of a pithy Chinese idiom can impart a figurative meaning, so can the precise choreography of gestures on canvas unfold a nexus of events. “They’re all constructing and bringing to the viewer a broad worldview and inner spiritual space,” she said.  

The issue kicks off with an expanded Datebook section of exhibitions and events we’re sure you’ll want to know about in the coming months, with some books and films and other things thrown in. We’re introducing fun and thought-provoking new sections, like Battle Royale, which pits one art world fixture against another (in this case, Chelsea and Tribeca, New York’s most-trafficked gallery districts), and Object Lesson, in which we explore a single artwork by an esteemed artist (first up is Jaune Quick-to See Smith, who has a retrospective on view now at the Whitney Museum). You’ll also see that we’ve given additional space to our columnists Chen & Lampert, who have added an interactive quiz to their popular Hard Truths advice column.

As for New Talent, we’ve increased the number of artists this time to 20—more in line with the huge number of exceptional creators who arise on the worldwide art scene every year. This year’s group skews to the Global South, where some of the most intriguing new talents are being cultivated these days. We’ve also included a special focus on New Talent in New York—where square-footage is expensive and competition among artists is intense—with a feature taking you into five artists’ studios. We offer even more new talent scattered throughout a feature on artists who are using fiber and textiles in ways that elevate the medium to the status of painting.

And we aren’t just celebrating new talent. Emily Watlington conducted a revealing interview with Kerry James Marshall, an artist who is at the top of his game—but refuses to be pegged to any one style.

Finally, with this issue we inaugurate a feature that you saw before you even opened the pages here: a cover artist. The idea is that, for each issue of Art in America, we will choose an emerging (or re-emerging) artist whose work we’ll showcase on the cover, and you’ll find an interview with that artist on the final page of the magazine, along with a full view of the artwork from which we chose a detail. In this case it’s a painting by Drake Carr, who summoned a spirited milieu rooted in part in his work as a bartender at a self-described “queer tiki disco dive bar” in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Learn more about it on page 136—and enjoy the read.

New Talent
20 exciting artists to watch, as chosen by the editors of Art in America.

New Talent New York
A.i.A. visits the studios of five New York–based artists on the rise.

Fiber Is the New Painting
On gallery walls, tapestries are replacing canvases as young artists disregard distinctions between fine art and folk art.
by Wendy Vogel

Bow Down
As scholars revisit early matriarchal cultures, artists are rediscovering the Goddess movement.
by Eleanor Heartney

Grand Theft AI
A new lawsuit asks, can you steal a style?
by Shanti Escalante-De Mattei

Softer Power, with a French Touch
The Centre Pompidou’s landmark agreement with Saudi Arabia is more complicated than it seems. So are the politics of art there.
by Devorah Lauter

DEPARTMENTS

Datebook
A highly discerning list of things to experience over the next three months.
by the Editors of A.i.A.

Issues & Commentary
The best and worst artists of our time are sending work into space.
by Emily Watlington 

Battle Royale 
Tribeca vs. Chelsea—gallery districts face off. 
by the Editors of A.i.A.

Syllabus
A reading list for a crash course on video art.
by Emily Watlington 

Inquiry
A Q&A with Kerry James Marshall about his new exquisite corpse works.
by Emily Watlington 

Sightlines
Counterpublic curator Allison Glenn tells us what she likes.
by Francesca Aton

Hard Truths
A teacher and an artist ask for advice. Plus, an interactive quiz.
by Chen & Lampert

Appreciation
A tribute to Peter Schjeldahl, writer of vivid, unforgettable prose.
by Jackson Arn

Book Review
A reading of Amanda Wasielewski’s Computational Formalism: Art History and Machine Learning.
by Sonja Drimmer

Object Lesson
An annotation of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s Memory Map.
by Francesca Aton

Spotlight
Revisiting Leon Polk Smith’s abstractions in the context of identity.
by Barry Schwabsky

Cover Artist
Drake Carr talks about his painting featured on the front of the magazine. 
by the Editors of A.i.A.

REVIEWS

Hong Kong
Hong Kong Diary
by Andrew Russeth

New York
“Bispo do Rosario: All Existing Materials on Earth”
by Elise Chagas

“Juan de Pareja, Afro-Hispanic Painter”
by Maria H. Loh

Cape Town
“When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting”
by Nkgopoleng Moloi

Sharjah
The 15th Sharjah Biennial
by Emily Watlington

Berlin
“Martin Wong: Malicious Mischief”
by Martin Herbert

To capture this familiar feeling—of needing to do several things at once, of there not being enough hours in the day, of commuting in a state of zombielike exhaustion—the Danish artist Hannah Toticki has created a series of garments that double as life hacks. Her debut museum solo, on view at the National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens (EMΣT) through May 28, includes apparel that allows you to sleep anywhere: puff coats that expand into sleeping bags, a sweater with decorative stitching that culminates in ear plugs.

Toticki made another group of garments to ease your housekeeping burden, and her craft is stunning: You might not even notice that a peplum-y tunic, titled Reproductive Labor (2022), comprises dish towels and sponges. With this outfit, there’s no problem if your shirt gets wet, and you will never wonder where you left the towel. It also lightens your laundry load.

I asked Toticki, who has a background in theater, why she decided to make these pieces artworks—edition of one, shown on mannequins in museums—rather than a line of clothing she could sell. (I asked partly for this article, and partly because I wanted one.) She said convincingly that reusing found fabrics to create unique editions is one thing, but trying to mass produce an affordable fashion line ethically and sustainably was its own beast. For my part, I think the garments work better as sculptures anyway: they are more about making a point than they are earnest, labor-saving gimmicks. Plenty such gimmicks already exist—like slippers that can be used to clean your floor as you walk around the house—but they have yet to save us.

In addition to the sleep and housework attire, the EMΣT show, titled “Everything, Everywhere, All the Time, has a set of outfits devoted to production. Prayers for Protection (2016) renders clergy garb in safety orange, drawing a continuum between the protestant work ethic and the cult of capitalism. The exhibition text characterizes our obsession with productivity as a kind of “religious devotion.” A set of gloves features keyboard keys on the fingertips, so you can type on the go. One pair spells out PAY: RENT.

But the show’s standout work is not a garment at all. Instead, RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE: (2021) is a kinetic sculpture in which a series of flappy green “hands” ascends a yellow conveyor belt to smack a keyboard that sits at the top. Figures from Karl Marx to Elon Musk have claimed that robots will liberate us from work and free us to create art. But in our time brimming with both technology and workaholism, the opposite seems true. Door Dash drivers and Amazon workers can attest that, instead, robots often demand that humans work more like machines.

In fact, Toticki said the work was inspired by injuries born of industrialization, like carpal tunnel syndrome, which often results from long-term repetitive movement. “We need to develop a new working culture, not just more machines,” she said.

It’s become almost boring to complain about capitalism, or how busy you are. (First off, same. Second, we already know.) But Toticki said she was pleasantly surprised by how many strangers reached out about RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE: to say “that piece is like … my life.” The defeated apathy with which the lifeless hands keep hitting the keyboard in an infinite loop of email replies is almost as silly as it is sad. Certainly, it is an artwork that captures the feeling of exhaustion endemic to our times.

This overwhelming sense of immediacy is a little misleading, as Simms has been working in assemblage for a very long time, steadily incorporating the flotsam of everyday life into his sculpture. Born in Jamaica in 1961, he immigrated to New York at the age of seven. (His mother preceded him there by three years, working as a nanny to earn money before the rest of the family arrived.) For as long as he can remember, he’s made things out of whatever he finds: toys out of corks, slingshots out of sticks and rubber. This obsessive creativity led him to study art at Brooklyn College in the mid-1980s, under the mentorship of William T. Williams. After stints as an art handler at Paula Cooper Gallery and the Brooklyn Museum, Simms went on to lead the art program at La Guardia Community College, one of the campuses of the CUNY system, where he has taught for sixteen years. He’s a veteran, then, who—like so many Black artists of his generation—is only now getting the widespread recognition he is due. His work has been shown steadily in the USA, the Caribbean and in Europe since the 1990s, and he even organized a Jamaican Pavilion for the Venice Biennale in 2001, but it wasn’t until a well-received retrospective exhibition at Martos Gallery in New York in 2021 that his exhibition schedule began keeping pace with his prolific output. This year, he has a major solo show at Karma Gallery in Los Angeles, again including work from the past thirty years, as well as a powerful installation of new work at San Carlo Cremona, a deconsecrated seventeenth-century church outside of Milan. The deteriorated but still transcendent house of worship is the perfect setting for Simms, who has a longstanding fascination with that period of Italian art. (The paintings of Caravaggio, with their dramatic scenes illuminated by heavenly light, are a particular interest.) The ecclesiastical surroundings put into the ritualistic aspects of his sculpture into high relief, illuminating their strong implication of the sacred.

Like a baroque allegory, Simms’s works are densely populated with emblems. The exhibition in Cremona is called “I am the Bush Doctor, One Halo,” which is also the name of a large-scale drawing hanging vertically in the space. The title is taken from a song by Peter Tosh, and pays tribute to vernacular healers in Jamaica, among them the artist’s own father, who treated his neighbors’ everyday ailments with homemade concoctions. Here and there, the show does acknowledge conventional Christian iconography; some of Simms’s sculptures suggest arks holding unknown covenants, for example. But the signals are reliably mixed. The proliferation of feathers in the installation could be taken from angels’ wings, but they also refer to Native American and African spiritual traditions, as well as expressing the fundamental idea of vulnerability: “you could reach out and just snap them off,” Simms notes.  A bicycle wheel aslant the tip of a slender rod in Il Santo del Mare (2023) does indeed look like a pageant-costume halo, but also conjures the spirit of Marcel Duchamp, high priest of the avant garde. In another work, a motorcycle helmet emblazoned with the word SHARK is propped on top of a guitar, the instrument perhaps a nod to Cremona’s most famous son, the luthier Antonio Stradivari (born in 1644), who could well have prayed at this very chapel.

These layered storylines criss-cross Simms’s work, just like the twine and wire he so often uses. Normally disconnected cultural narratives are tied together into a tight knot of signification. To some extent, this is just what assemblage art does. He is participating in a grand tradition that extends back to the Surrealists, via Robert Rauschenberg’s Combines and the wrapped sculptures of Jackie Winsor. Equally relevant are visionary artists like the Philadelphia Wire Man and Judith Scott, as well as African nkisi spirit containers and warding objects (aale), and vernacular forms like the “bottle trees” of Black communities in the American South, dedicated to the principle that “where light is, evil shall not pass.” Simms acknowledges all of these precedents and peers, but in his case there is a special quality of inclusivity. In his work, as the art historian Robert Storr put it in a 2005 essay, “opposites attract, difference accents difference, and multiplicity is the predicate for mutuality.”

Doubtless, this connective energy has much to do with Simms’s own life story. Diasporic migration, both brutally enforced (like the voyages that brought his ancestors to Jamaica) and freely chosen (like the move that his own family undertook when he was a child), is ever present as subject matter in his oeuvre. He has made several symbolic portraits of his mother that incorporate handwritten letters she has sent him over the years, thinking of the time they spent apart when he was young. Some of his sculptures actually can be rolled around—a practical feature, given their scale, as well as a symbolic one—and non-functional wheels, toy cars, and vehicle components make frequent appearances. He cites the improvised carts used by street sellers in Jamaica as an influence on these works, but they also clearly embody movement as an abstract principle. At the most fundamental level, his practice is all about getting from here to there, without leaving any part of himself behind.

One of Simms’s most affecting, and oft-repeated, gestures speaks to another, even more personal connection: his marriage to the painter Lucy Fradkin. The two artists (who share the studio in Staten Island) are an interracial couple. As a kind of signature, Simms represents their union with a little rectangular patch of their hair, his black, hers red, glued to the surface of many of his works, side-by-side. But even at his most autobiographical, Simms is an improviser at heart, and never sets out to control the narrative of his work. Its storyline remains perpetually open, to the extent that he treats his own past work as a quarry, disassembling pieces and reincorporating them continually into new creations.

This helps to account, perhaps, for the extraordinary animacy of Simms’s work. He chooses every scrap and stone, every bit of detritus, often for personal reasons. Yet in his studio, surrounded by the things he has made over the years, he commented that it is “important to make something outside of yourself,” something that can lead a life of its own. Even as Simms lashes his objects together, bundling them tightly, and places them into choreographies, instantly and insistently memorable, he grants them a kind of ultimate freedom. When he does send them out into the world, it’s in the spirit of pushing a bird out of its nest, certain that it knows how to fly.

To any student of modern trends in art it is readily apparent that Salvador Dali’s present position is at best a most ambiguous one. The “experts” and “critics” have consistently refused to assign him any lasting or consecutive place. They still seem to regard his influence as unimportant upon anything except possibly advertising art, and – as has been facetiously said – himself! 

And yet it is well known that during the ten years, 1930-1940, Salvador Dali cut a wide and glittering swath across the fields of art in general and surrealism in particular. He came to the United States on the crest of the surrealist wave which did not reach this country till the early 30s, just in time to recompense us for the lost realities of the fat years of the late 20s, in time to offer the American public a world of fantasy far more acceptable than the realities of the depression. Dali had the ability to abstract and refine all the real values of the movement. He was therefore able to present to America the very essence of it, ennobled by the full effect of his intricate personal symbology. But he far eclipsed the surrealists, for he did not fall heir to the psychopathologies which finally caused the movement to die out in fitful, pathetic sputters in the flesh pots of Europe. With his sheer technical mastery and natural flare for publicity, he was able to make surrealism in America his own, and to exercise a profound influence on art as a whole because he had freed himself from the shackles of a minor movement, and stood as a symbol of freedom from the inertia and lassitude which overtook art after the stimulation of surrealism was lessened by use and familiarity and dissensions. He therefore gradually became synonymous with all that surrealism implies in art both here and abroad, while the original surrealists, one by one, have fallen into all varieties of second class discard. And his symbols slowly became the actual symbols of the movement to the “uncretinized” masses in whom the new socialization of culture was creating an intense demand for sensations far beyond what has always been considered in good taste for culture and art among the wealthy. The soft violoncello, the cephalic deformation, ants, the grasshopper, the deflated head of the masturbator, the Angelus, the crutch; all these and many more, came to be accepted as the original manifestation of an irrational surrealism, of a Hollywood madness which the newly awakened to art could at least talk about if they could not understand. 

So Dali emerged from this productive decade having succeeded in almost completely identifying American surrealism with his own symbology, at least in the popular mind. This was an accomplishment of no small scope, and may yet prove to be of tremendous ultimate importance in the artistic history of our time. 

But by and large the critics and the inner circles of the art world have remained stonily unimpressed by Dali’s concepts and conceits, refusing even to be amused. Only a very few museums have examples of his work, and those examples are about equally divided between gifts and purchases. Many important new books on art decline to give Dali any real recognition, implying he is either beyond the scope of the work, or has become too controversial a subject to merit a place in contemporary appraisals of artistic influences. Now that Dali has virtually forsaken easel painting for a wide variety of projects in the fields of ballet, opera, portraiture, and writing, as well as special promotional assignments, one may look back over the past fifteen years of his career and observe with some perspective what he has accomplished, and wherein he will perhaps be charged with failure. 

There has no doubt been some chicanery in his career, artistic and other, wise. The aura of his antics has to no small extent permeated, and perhaps to some esthetes, tainted his works. But withal, his recorded dream world stands like a splendid if somewhat deprecated monument to his genius. His easel paintings of the 30s will eventually come to be regarded as immortal sign posts pointing the way out of a sloppy, hopelessly jumbled, and decadent surrealism, as well as a way out of the general impasse in which all art found itself about this time when there were no great innovators or leaders except Dali, and one or two other geniuses. 

Yet Dali has always managed to stand apart from the minor movements in modern art, like a Leonardo of the age, and as such – an individualist – he is still subject to attack by the proponents of a socialized or popularized art. If these regimentalists had their way they would systematize art, claiming such a sterilizing procedure would make it readily teachable. And they would eliminate all eccentricities, irregularities and innovations from it. Since they could not account for Dali they would eliminate him by minimizing his influence and accomplishments in somewhat the following vein. 

Dali will undoubtedly be called a casualty of the war, for since he left Spain and his native Catalan background, he has perhaps tended to reminisce rather than to create, has tended toward seeking the lucrative in art, rather than the verities of it. It might be charged that the novelty of his symbology ceased when he left the old world, and that since he has been in this country he has painted more like a man influenced by Salvador Dali than like Dali himself. It will be said he has merely parodied his own work, and that one by one he has prostituted the sacred symbols of his own distinctly personal surrealism to common commercial ends. It will be said that his symbols are like Frankenstein’s Monster, turning against their creator. When he sits down to paint he will be likened to an old maid making Dali samplers. His works will have lost their punch, the age of his dream-whimsey will have died, he will become victimized and ridiculed by his own cosmology. The surrealist symbols he elevated to be art in the popular mind were adapted to various publicity stunts. The telephone which he originally taught was fraught with the timeless significance of Munich will be likened to a night club ad; the ant which he said was the delicate symbol of the jewel-like matter of our own eventual decay will become associated with a gross caricature of itself on a necktie; the dream, like lassitude of the perfect clouds from the fruitful decade will be said to have degenerated to sharp and thinly-painted frou-frou to embellish expensive portraits. He will be pointed out as a man who mimicked his own surprises to the point where they no longer surprised anyone, to the point where no one will ever take his symbology or intentions seriously again.

Some critic is sure to point out before long that everything seen in Dali’s most serious works is being seen again in parody form in stocking ads in Vogue, or vastly blown up on a ballet curtain, or even taken for a background of a musical show. Such reexpression of his original artistic dream surrealism is undoubtedly remunerative, but it does provide a fine target for the critic who can logically raise the question if Dali ever had anything else in mind but an ultimate commercial exploitation of his art, and if that fact having been perceived by connoisseurs has not militated against his mastership in art. Such a reuse of the established symbols will indubitably be said to be bad for his artistic reputation, for no museum will value a picture – a masterpiece – which has been parodied in a necktie pattern and advertised in Esquire – at least not until the necktie has been forgotten for a long time!

And yet such tactics have made Dali and his intimate personal concepts the talk of every shop girl in the land! That art should be for the masses, that the luxury of the little private madnesses and eccentricities is no longer exclusively reserved for the well-to-do, but can now be indulged in by anyone to whom Dali has brought his symbols, is a matter of such fundamental and tremendous importance to the art world that its significance has barely begun to be apparent. Even the bourgeoisie puts up a feeble protest against any novelty in art, especially any novelty which hints at their own neuroticism and fear of change, by calling Dali childish and insane. It will be said in resistance to Dali’s exceptional originality that such a broad concept of art as would admit his artistic antics is not really “art,” but merely an immediate and shrewd merchandising of it.

Someone may also point out that Dali perhaps defeated his own purpose in his publicity stunts and sensational painting, for while he thereby achieved a momentary fame in Life and Sunday Magazine Supplements – fame of a rather “notorious” kind because it was among the masses he at the same time made himself shocking and undesirable to the often ultra-conservative persons who control the purse strings of museums and so in turn the somewhat sanctimonious judgment of the director in his inner office. It is obvious that the tone of many museum collections is all too of ten determined by the spinsterish tastes of affluent donors behind the scenes, not the progressive student or even reasonably emancipated. visitor. Many museums also have a policy of waiting until an artist’s work becomes rare and expensive, and make the tacit assumption that these two facts have made him immortal, famous, or both, and hence desirable as a “public” possession. This policy, coupled with the chicanery sometimes attributed to Dali, no doubt accounts for so few of his works being in permanent museum collections. However, it will still be remarked against the artist that he counted on the somewhat sensational society people whom he paints in his portraits to extend their influence for him into the inner circles of art, while actually it is not this gala group at all that determines what is what in art. It will therefore be said that the reason Dali is achieving such a fundamentally limited representation in the art museum is that he has not really been as shrewd a merchandiser of technique as he thought he was, implying that he should have addressed him, self to the real powers in the American Art World: the staunch, gray dowager, and the retired, conservative corporation director, and the museum visitor who writes indignant letters about any novelty that comes his way. To such people, the content of dreams is without a doubt a shocking memory, and nothing to be perpetuated on institutional walls!

Before long some one will undertake a survey of Dali’s influence upon advertising art. Innovators in this field where novelty is at a premium were quick to sieze upon the deep perspective publicized by Dali in such pictures as The Font and Shades of Night Descending. Almost overnight the tone of the slick paper magazine ad was changed. Yet Dali’s activities in this direction, while they had a far-reaching influence on American Art as well, will, however, probably be said to have lowered the value of his serious works. All the nostalgia of one of his masterpieces will be found in a garter ad in the Saturday Evening Post. He will be accused of bring, ing the lofty concepts of his art into a realm where they could not descend without cheapening their ultimate value as museum pieces. Yet on every hand we now accept ads with ridiculous dream-world juxtapositions of extraneous objects selected for their incongruity. A few years ago, before Dali, our sensibilities would have been outraged.

In literature a great many dream worlds exist which are accepted as masterpieces. Yet in the field of painting a curious taint attaches to any picture which is the least bit experimental in its subject matter. Many “art masterpieces” are experimental, even insane, in technique, and yet they are accepted by the very conservative. But where the subject matter is not in accord with even the most drunken preconception of reality, the work is slighted even though the technique is perfection itself.

There remains one chink in Dali’s armor. This is not an age of great artistic freedoms. Wherever there are purges, bannings, and bowdlerizings, radical artistic concepts like Dali’s will be automatically subject to critical interpretive readings in the search by both sides for alien motives. There is no avenue of neutral gray between the black of one side and the white of the other down which an artist may walk in freedom, for if such paths were left open to the artist they would also be open to the average man whose horror of war is becoming increasingly pronounced, but whose conceptions cannot yet seem to encompass a vast zone of freedoms between various ideologies. It is too bad that an artist and his art cannot exist apart from the conflicting political movements of his times. The fact that Dali has never come out with any clear-cut statement as to his political leanings means that he and his art are both probably suspected by the party in ascendency as well as by the party being submerged. There is also some reaction against him as a result of his being a foreigner, a feeling that he has come to this country merely to cash in on it, not to become part of it. Such sentiments are just as jejune as saying that because the titles of his works are often almost facetious or without the brief dignity ordinarily attributed to ‘masterpieces,’ his works are not finding their way museum, ward. The Average Atmospherocephalic Bureaucrat in the Act of Milking a Cranial Harp is a title, which while it might distract a routine mind, nevertheless to a free mind connotes a free artist.

But in spite of all these varied potential counter-arguments, there still seems to be an ultimate destiny of some importance for Dali’s works, even though that destiny may be but dimly perceived at present by professional critics who in most cases dismiss Dali as a mere clever artistic mountebank. Dali has always painted with some purpose, a far vaster and more com, prehensive purpose than is found in the works of the lesser surrealists and more conventional artists of the period. One sometimes gets the feeling that the average surrealist, whose inspirations on the whole were remarkably limited and one-tracked, disowned Dali out of sheer jealousy of his manifold talent and inclusive concepts which of course enabled him to make a far better living than the small fry of the movement. All too of ten such fundamental and human motivating factors are overlooked in art criticisms. One critic actually remarked in effect that Dali could not create great masterpieces while living in a swank hotel. Such a statement probably tells one more about the man who made it than about Dali if one stops to think it over.

From the very beginning of his productive years Dali manifested a tremendous energy and versatility which enabled him to encompass without copying all the major aspects of surrealism as expressed in the works of minor artists of the times. He has always been an exquisite miniaturist. Under a magnifying glass the detail of his works maintains all its precision and perfection. Works so incredibly fine and delicate, like a dream land, scape, are reminiscent of reality rather than realistic. It is as though one were focusing on some memory through the wrong end of a telescope. Or again, it is as though one were studying a color negative of an actual scene. Should the topic of a Dali painting ever be presented to you in reality, it would be recognizable immediately from the “color plate” once seen in the painting. Infinite detail beyond the scope of most artists is an essential to such visions. Yet for the obtuse or slightly unimaginative person, the subject matter of a Dali canvas of ten acts to obscure all the classical perfection of the painting itself. Such an individual should realize that Dali does not produce a mere picture: he far transcends the commonplace reality, and snatches details from his subconscious mind which are of ten gruesome and fantastic, even though such details stem from classical memories of Vermeer, Leonardo or Raphael (as in The Madonna of the Birds). Dali’s memories are probably not without conscious direction; and they are sometimes distorted in the mutation to the point where their impact ceases to be surrealist and becomes of a far more comprehensive importance to the field of art in general in perpetuating renovated or revivified twentieth century conceptions of the conventional classics. Everything else in life is being modernized, why not modernize some established conceptions? This type of classical inspiration for Dali’s surrealism, however, is not to be confused with his more whimsical inspirations such as The Ship, wherein he begins with an ordinary color print and imposes his vision upon the original conception.

Dali has given impetus to several potential or nuclear movements in art, particularly in the field of psychological art, which have not yet begun to be apparent for two reasons. First, we are too preoccupied with war and its implications to demand or require novelty in art; and second, because Dali’s colossal conceit in evaluating his own potential influence on art in his Secret Life has acted to inhibit any immediate claimants to such an impertinent influence which could possibly predict its own importance in a field as vagarious as art. Nevertheless Dali himself is adept at expressing in his works all the things in life which ordinarily cannot be made verbally or pictorially explicit. Since these things do not have the familiar and reassuring outlines of sanity and reality which would tend to make them acceptable (perhaps in the guise of experimental art) to the good, stolid citizen, it may be said that Dali is painting years ahead of his time. But the times are fast catching up. Our wars with all their vast contradictions, and our increasing industrial crimes against man’s simple nature are generating a vast audience of psychoneurotics to whom Dali will make an increasing amount of sense.

Surrealism originally was the only means of expression available to sensitive persons, paranoiacs and other mild neurotics who could not stand the dissolutions and disillusions of the previous postwar world. There will always have to be some terrific and often neurotic compensations for the horrible tensions and vicarious moral freedoms which are so promiscuously enjoyed during war time. These compensations previously culminated in the surrealism of the 20s, as far as art was concerned, and out of the maelstrom of compensations Dali emerged to redeem art from the slapstick and undisciplined heritage of an expressive surrealism, which was trying to reincarnate all the madness of war and its sentiments neurotically, without the benefit of cannons and machine guns. It was only natural that surrealism should stir the course of art then, as war did the course of humanity.

What will the repercussions on art be ten or fifteen years after we have done without the current hypnotic hysterics of war? When there is no more war anymore, there will be no compensating social conditions to produce the environments which succor the relatively harmless madness of surrealism. We only need a super-reality (a Dalinian dream world) when society foists an intolerable reality upon us. Therefore the future may well see a resurgence of some type of surrealism, possibly revolving around certain elements of the Dalinian symbology. By remaking advertising techniques Dali has already laid the ground work for the future acceptance of himself in the popular mind. The need for such an escapist cosmology as Dali’s, such an interpretive madness, such an ultimate free, dom for the individual mind as Dali propounds in his paintings wherein he most eloquently pleads for the right of every man to his own madness, is engendered because even adults must have some place where they can escape robot bombs, regimentation, and indeed our very sanity which seems to lead us into war. Dali is the one artist who energetically picked art up from the post-surrealism (post war) doldrums and is carrying it over to the next “ism.” He is the link between the art of postwar yesterday and the art of postwar tomorrow.

Dali constructs a heaven which is found in a capricious reality imposed however incongruously upon the elements of what for more and more people may yet prove an intolerable one. Dali teaches a super-experience one can enjoy while living, no matter how precariously, and his truths become the more apparent as one grows less able to stand the realities of what the senses actually convey. Dali’s paintings will have an increasing amount of appeal to a scientific nation, for the science of humanity lags far behind the science of things; and as we become more highly industrialized we become more maladjusted, more neurotic, more in need of irrational comforts such as Dali provides.

Thus Dali’s surrealism, or something stemming from it, actually may yet become one main hope for the survival of a basic artistic freedom from regimentation in the postwar era – a freedom from a cruel, rational reality. Reality may well prove to be insupportable again for sensitive people, esthetes, and others. They will have no enthusiasm for anything in art except what does not remind the beholder of the potential postwar chaos, of all the tragic disillusions which follow the cool breath of Victory, of new W. P. A.s in art, of all the floundering disjointed souls who cannot find peace because the narcotics of war are being denied them. They will only be able to find equivalent excitement and release in the intensified experience of their imaginations in which realm Dali has been pioneering with such purpose for so long.

One may still see Dali’s imaginative dream world symbology reborn, revitalized, becoming the very symbols of hope for the distraught neurotic masses of the world. By then people will probably finally realize that they have been horribly fooled by a “correct” rational reality. They will be ready to accept the reflowering of a human, an irrational surrealism which can bring all the comfort and stimulating distractions of a magic world to them as cultural neophytes. If this should happen, the high purpose many feel inherent in Dali’s darting surrealism will have more than triumphed over the charges made against it, and established the artist in the permanent annals of art. If it does not, then the socialization of art will probably have become complete, and Dali’s works will remain as final (and no doubt suppressed) tributes to a dying individualism in a world of regimented and enervated art.

Editor’s note: The original article published in 1945 did not include an accent mark on Dalí’s name.