ATLANTA — Salvador Dali’s late work started unusually early. He was born in 1904 and soon displayed a precocious skill for ultra-refined hyperrealism. By the late 1920s he had painted some of the smallest, most peculiar masterpieces of surrealism. Within a decade he was widely seen as having entered — again precociously — a decline that became ever more precipitous, exacerbated by relentless self-promotion, shameless hucksterism and a fervent return to Roman Catholicism.

“Dali: The Late Work” at the High Museum of Art here largely lays waste to the presumption that late Dali is bad Dali, and that most Dali is late.

In so doing it joins other exhibitions that have done their share to loosen the grip of canonical European and American painting and sculpture on the history of art. While forces like multiculturalism, anti-colonialism and the various liberation movements have done much more to make art history bigger, messier and truer, there have also been what might be called inside jobs: expansions of the canon from within. These include reconsiderations of the perennially disdained “late work” of established 19th- and 20th-century painters like Dali, fresh assessments that have helped overturn closely held notions of connoisseurship, quality and historical significance, while eroding the cult of youth.

Again and again it has been demonstrated that the unpredictable cocktail of fading energy and seasoned talent, of mortality and desperation (just another word for ambition) can accomplish wonders. This summer began with a perturbing show of late Renoir at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Over the past couple of years, important exhibitions of late Picasso and the late work of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner brightened the New York gallery scene. Kandinsky’s late work more than held up its end of the Guggenheim’s retrospective in 2009. Late Picabia has been one of the cornerstones of postmodern painting, and in the 1970s Philip Guston’s late works unfolded as living proof that it’s not over until it’s over. Jasper Johns and Lucien Freud perform similar feats now.

Possibly terrible

On first perusal the High Museum exhibition seems destined to confirm art-world assumptions about Dali. There are definitely some not-so-great, possibly terrible paintings here, including the commissioned portraits, like the one of Walt Disney. It turns out that the only person Dali painted convincingly was his wife, sidekick and handler, Gala. In addition, Dali is overwhelmingly present — in photographs, on film, in quotations emblazoned on the wall — and is often fairly obnoxious, eyes abulge, signature mustache adroop.

In the opening gallery he does parlor tricks with his facial hair, shaping his mustache into a paint brush, bull’s horns and a dollar sign. The second gallery is devoted to his exuberant collaborations with the photographer Philippe Halsman. Dali glowers at a rhinoceros; he leaps into the air amid a swath of flung cats and water. He paints a Medusa’s head on Gala’s forehead, and apes Velazquez’s painting “Las Meninas” against a woozy backdrop of gingham.

Further on, a typical exhibition documentary plays opposite a wall checkered with photographs of Dali hanging out at Max’s Kansas City and admiring quotations from Alfred Hitchcock, Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons. Elsewhere Dali appears in a television studio in 1960, lecturing and sketching on a blackboard and then, in a manner reminiscent of Yves Klein, orchestrating a Happening while Halsman adeptly serves as interviewer-straight man. Abstract expressionism, abstract painting in general and the work of Mondrian in particular are extensively dissed throughout.

Then, suddenly, there’s something surprising: Dali mentions his belief in the power of “strictly visual communication.” Strange words from a man who manipulated every aspect of his life and person to get attention. But the paintings bear him out. Each one is a furious little world — or a quite large one — unto itself, a visual rabbit hole of recognizable forms, motifs and symbols, from the structure of the atom to the Madonna and Child.

Mixed motivations

Once the art takes over, this is a terrific, even shattering show. Organized by the Dali expert Elliott King, it includes works from foreign museums that have not been seen in the United States for more than 50 years, as well as generous loans from the intrepid Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Fla.

At the exhibition’s center is an artist who spent most of his life dissecting and diversifying the almost freakish skill that first earned him his reputation as a painter, while also making prints, designing jewelry and even dabbling in holograms. He was motivated by many things: religious faith, love of the old masters, a striking interest in science, and his passion for the austere landscape and shorelines of his beloved Catalonia. And always there was the desperate, desperate desire to be current, to be part of his own time and in step with, or preferably a bit ahead of, its art — and, of course, to best the competition. One of the earliest late Dalis here is “Debris of an Automobile Giving Birth to a Blind Horse Biting a Telephone” from 1938, a lush, witty riposte to Picasso’s “Guernica,” as well as a technical tour de force of scratching and rubbing through black paint laid over white.

New heights of strangeness

Dali mixed these motivations in different ratios from painting to painting. In works like “Christ of St. John of the Cross” (1951), for example, a very now crucifixion image, he comes close to being a modern Renaissance painter, with faith his chief subject. An astute balance of showmanship and restraint, this work seems to present a God’s-eye view, eerily evoking years before fact the famous “Earthrise” photograph taken during the 1968 Apollo 8 mission. The painting may show the cross ascending to heaven, with its occupant shedding his suffering as it goes. In any event, he is a healthy young man, with rippling muscles free of cuts and bruises and short wavy brown hair free of thorny crown. His face, while not visible, is surely movie-star handsome.

In this work Dali takes Renaissance perspective to new heights of strangeness; in others he attempts to reconcile religious belief with new threats to it, including the discovery of the atom and the God-like power of the atomic bomb. In “Madonna of Port Lligat” (1950), in which Gala is cast as the Virgin, everything is in suspension, like the floating atoms that make up matter, and both mother and child are rendered transparent by squares cut in their torsos. Before them on a dark, low altar, widely spaced objects that can be read symbolically — a folded cloth, a shell, a fish, a bowl — form a still life out of Zurbaran.

It all matters

You learn in this show that, jokes aside, little is actually superfluous. Dali’s face-off with the rhinoceros, for example, is given weight by the frequent appearances of rhinoceros horns in paintings and drawings. Often they swirl and coalesce like oddly shaped atoms into the silhouettes of figures or heads, as in “The Maximum Speed of Raphael’s Madonna” (1954). Dali was drawn to the horn because its growth patterns adhere to a mathematical formula — the Fibonacci series that would later attract Mario Merz and Donald Judd.

Dali’s anticipation of pop, neo-expressionism and even photo appropriation in paintings like the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 1958 “Sistine Madonna” — which makes you think of both Roy Lichtenstein and Sigmar Polke — is well-known. This show elucidates his constant dialogue with the loose, gestural brushwork of abstract expressionism, which in Dali’s hands is often a kind of refined calligraphy usually executed in shades of white and gray. In “Saint Surrounded by Three Pi-Mesons” (1956), the suspended notational brushwork brings to mind Mark Tobey. In the gray, cloudy, “Portrait of Juan de Pareja, Assistant to Velazquez” (1960), which is full of delicate rivulets of thin paint, the competition may be Yves Tanguy, whose refined surrealism was influenced by Dali.

Is late Dali better than the early shining prodigy? This exhibition suggests that this comparison is almost apples and oranges. The point may be that although many artists produce great and historically important works while young, in modern times at least they don’t really know themselves, or art (which may be the same thing), until they are much older.

Had Dali died in 1938, he would have had a very nice, neat, narrow niche in the history of art. By living and working as long as he did — he stopped painting in 1983 and died six years later — he left a legacy that is incalculably richer, psychologically and artistically, and much more instructive.

It is sad that this show will not travel and tantalizing to imagine its repercussions in big, artist-dense cities like New York or Los Angeles. It is well worth the trip to Atlanta.