Dalí/Duchamp review – surreal bromance between art's odd couple

Royal Academy, London
With their dirty jokes, sly puns and decadent eroticism, these subversive provocateurs have more in common than you might think – but there’s no doubt who was the greater artist

In a note on a piece of scrap paper, Marcel Duchamp explained why he adopted the name Rrose Sélavy for his female alter ego, who gazes out from a sultry black and white photo taken in the 1920s. The name of his drag persona is, he explains, “an easy pun”. Rrose Sélavy sounds like “Eros, c’est la vie” – meaning “Eros, that’s life.”

This exhibition could easily have the same pun as its title, for that belief is what connects the two most subversive provocateurs of the 20th century. Salvador Dalí’s life’s mission was to revel in base lusts. Men and women masturbate copiously in his work, most notably in his 1929 painting The First Days of Spring, in which a grey-faced man collapses on a woman’s breasts. At first sight, a display of some of his most straightforwardly pornographic drawings near some of Duchamp’s most revered readymades seems a bizarre coupling, yet among the latter’s objects is Please Touch, a book cover adorned with a fake rubber breast. Both artists seem enthusiastically depraved, which is what makes this exhibition such a delight.

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