Salvador Dalí (1904-89) considered himself a prophet and a genius, and much of the world agrees, judging from the popularity of his prints and the several museums devoted to his work. Critics have tended to be less enthusiastic about the flamboyant Catalonian, whose promotional stunts and forays into fashion and advertising helped make him a household name. In recent years, a spate of exhibitions commemorating the centennial of his birth has prompted a reassessment. “Dalí: Painting and Film,” which opens this Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art, makes the best possible case for the artist, highlighting his early paintings and what may be the most masterful and original work of all: his early cinematographic collaborations with Luis Buñuel.

Organized by Tate Modern in collaboration with The Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation, the exhibition includes some 130 paintings, drawings, scenarios, letters, and films. (A program of more than 50 related films by Dalí and others will also be shown in the museum’s theaters through September.) The exhibition reminds us of the merits of his paintings from the early 1930s, and will pleasantly surprise those unfamiliar with Dalí’s early films. But its central thesis — that film was integral to his artistic development — is undercut by two circumstances: the paucity of completed films after 1930, and the declining merit of later films and paintings alike. The later works on both canvas and celluloid show an artist no longer revolutionary in outlook, and burdened with plenty of irritating habits, not least of them an obliviousness about the traditions of great art.

The first gallery of the chronological installation includes several lively drawings in black gouache of city scenes (1922-23), whose rich tones already reflect the teenage artist’s interest in film. Dominating the space, however, is the projection of “Un Chien andalou” (1929), presented in its entire 16-minute length. Eighty years later, it still delights for its darkly humorous symbolizations of lust and guilt. Dalí’s furious imagination is everywhere evident, from the famous opening scene of the sliced eyeball, to the visions of a hand oozing ants, and the denouement (if so disjunctive a story can be said to have an ending) of figures disintegrating into sand. Such images demonstrate the ability of film, in Dalí’s phrase, to turn ordinary objects into a “super-reality that goes beyond ballet.”

In the next gallery, Dalí and Buñuel’s second and final collaboration, “L’Âge d’Or” (1930), is on view, presented in its full 63-minute length. Its polemical, political overtones suggest Buñuel’s dominating hand, but the striking images of a cow in a four-poster bed and a pedestrian sporting a bread loaf hat suggest Dalí’s touch. In a nearby display case, Dalí’s letter to Buñuel startles with his crudely elaborate suggestions for a scene with a woman’s mouth, viewed sideways, fading into an image of female genitalia.

The montage technique and shifts of scale in these films found a felicitous counterpart in Dalí’s contemporaneous paintings. “Illumined Pleasures” (1929), a painting with collaged elements, is little more than a foot wide, but its image of three framed scenes standing on a receding plane feels vast. Colors and textures impart a different intensity to each of these vignettes: the cool, grayed swirling horde of bicyclists (each with a stone for a hat); the warm regimen of a building’s verticals, shadowed by an enormous rock; the vacant blue expanse of sky, perforated by an upside-down grasshopper. Other details, such as a distant couple either embracing or grappling, clarify nothing about the image’s meaning but intensify the contrasts of scale. Along with other notable paintings, such as “The Accommodations of Desire” (1929) and “The Feeling of Becoming” (1931), it captures a measure of the brilliant refinement of Hieronymus Bosch, with colors tangibly animating the movements among masses and details.

Little else in the exhibition, though, quite compares with these early paintings and films. Dalí was to pursue film projects throughout his life but, for various reasons, most never materialized. The artist’s ambitions, moreover, appeared to take a commercial bent. His relationship with the Surrealists souring, he sought to become the face of Surrealism in America. He succeeded. Starting in 1934, he augmented his exhibitions in this country with such publicity stunts as delivering a lecture in a deep-sea diving suit. The installation includes numerous drawings and scenarios for his unrealized films, many of which seem like accessories to a performance: competent but predictable compilations of flaming giraffes, lip-shaped sofas and, time and again, those swarming ants.

Though he thrived on obscure philosophizing, Dalí’s most enduring efforts appealed to the masses. Set designs and studies for Alfred Hitchcock’s “Spellbound” (1945), representing his most successful collaboration with Hollywood, fill another gallery. The corresponding scene from the movie plays continuously on a large screen; Dalí’s lengthening shadows and dramatic perspectives prove an effective foil for the plot’s psychic melodrama. The animated film “Destino” had a less happy outcome. Originally abandoned in 1946, this collaboration with Walt Disney was revived and completed by the studio only in 2003, with a facile rendering style that removes the edge from Dalí’s every provocation. The exhibition also includes “Chaos and Creation” (1960), considered by some to be the first artist’s video, in which Dalí re-creates a Mondrian painting with a giant grid filled with pigs, a motorcycle, and a scantily clad model. “Impressions of Upper Mongolia-Homage to Raymond Roussel” (1975) is a faux-documentary about a search for giant mushrooms that invites the viewer to gaze for many minutes at what turns out to be a close-up of the marks etched on a pen by the artist’s urine.

And then there are the later paintings. Whether they depict melting acts of cannibalism, Hollywood celebrities, or post-nuclear baseball players, they impress with their vividly rendered volumes and often glowing illumination. Their textures — of the beady hardness of ants’ bodies, or a cloud’s feathery softness — provoke a tactile shudder. History, however, shows that all these qualities can be found in the work of accomplished but lesser artists — the Jean Louis Ernest Meissoniers, William Holman Hunts, and Eugène Carrières whom Dalí admired. Seldom apparent in Dalí’s later work is an appreciation of the more aggressive way that greater painters — the Raphaels and Courbets — employed colors and gestures not only to replicate objects but also to characterize them with qualities of weight, extension, compaction, and release. Dalí considered his own later paintings to be “classical,” but they express considerably less pictorial weight than the works of his fellow surrealists Max Ernst and de Chirico. For all its technical virtuosity, “Metamorphosis of Narcissus” (1937) merely illustrates a provocative idea; its jumble of colors fails to locate the basic impression of a kneeling figure and upright hand mirroring each other across a body of water. With a few exceptions — notably “Morphological Echo” (1934-36), which commits to the bravery of an arch against sky — most of the canvases after the early ’30s lack a painter’s conviction; they feel like products rather than adventures.

This, of course, could be just another strategy in today’s art world. “Painting and Film,” in fact, highlights the way Dalí’s peekaboo naughtiness anticipates the work of Jeff Koons. (Some sculptures by the latter bear an uncanny resemblance to Dalí’s 1977 “Retrospective Bust of a Woman,” a piece incorporating a porcelain display bust.) By the curious logic of the art world, Dalí’s lagging reputation may be buoyed by cementing it to the younger celebrity’s. Now there’s a Dalinian vision: Dalí and Koons roped together, sinking or bubbling upward in unison.

Until September 15 (11 W. 53rd St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 212-708-9400).