ATLANTA  Salvador Dalí’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.

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