Phillip O’Sullivan ‘The Lugubrious Game’ The Writers and Artists writings

about this painting in the career of Salvador Dali and Surrealism

Born May 11, 1904

Paradoxically we can see in Salvador Dali’s art a ‘Marquis de Sade

Justine –like’ emphasis on violence and depravity as a way of liberation
and freedom for the imagination. A really dead imagination to Dali is one of
convention lacking all surprise, innovation or shock-of-recognition: this
type of conventional art is/was all around the art community even/then and
now in Spain. Dalis young adult friend Frederico Garcia Lorca and he
agreed and utilized imagery of decay and death in their drawings, poems
and articles in order to emphasize this and shock the viewer or reader into
seeing more sharply by these devices; opening their eyes by threatening
the view of what they saw.
Ending his period with the army in 1927Dali summered in Cadaques with
Garcia Lorca. While there Dali wrote a poem titled “Saint Sebastián”, later
published in L’Amic de les Aris and the newspaper El Gallo. A drawing
being subsequently produced.
Around this time in a letter from 1926 he wrote out of the San Sebastia
theme “this single eye, suddenly enlarged, encompasses a whole scene of the bottom and
surface of an ocean in which all poetic suggestions navigate, and where all the plastic
possibilities are stabilized” (Finkelstein:30) The drawing has a pronounced encephalic aspect
in a headless torso with a fish apparatus emerging from the featureless absence. It has no
head.1 Arabic transparent typeface

The well crafted poetic prose made an impact on the Catalan literati. Dali
created a metaphor of the arrow-riddled saint discovering armour in his
1
As quoted in haim finkelstein art and writing 1927 1942 salvador vdali
san sebastia letter “this single eye, suddenly enlarged, encompasses a
whole scene of the bottom and surface of an ocean in which all poetic
suggestions navigate, and where all the plastic possibilities are stabilized”
page 30 finkelstein.1926 This headless/heedless aspect of Dalis art opens
up Freudian possibilities free of moral censorship and wide open to all
kinds of creative allowances. It is Bataille, whom he later meets in Paris,
who is philosophically closer to Dali at this point, than the Surrealist leader
Andre Breton later. Althought, realistically it is to Lorca whom he owes a
closer contemporary creative partnership in Spain.
faith and the artist carefully letting his imagery“ripen”, and Dali elaborated
on his ideas about painting being more accurate than the ‘reality’ of
photography. This argues for the greater psychological effect possible in
art. Dali is beginning in these Barcelona/Madrid years to probe into his
characteristic ‘paranoid critical method’ of painting. He had earlier adopted
a foppish dandy personae for himself as we see first in self portrait with
Raphealish Neck and in a self portrait drawing from 1922. (illustrate)

These ideas of ant decay, death and rotting donkeys, the putrescent
priests of convention (see also Batailles Lord Ausch writing…….) is also
prevalent in the extremely artistic Film En Chien Andalu (The Andalusian
Dogs) co-created in 1928-9 together with Bunuel another of Dalis Madrid
art-school friends, with whom he wrote the shooting script and contributed
graphic ideas including the famous cloud-sun/eye-cutting scene early in
the film. These three visual artists, intelligent, sensitive and culturally
aware, inhabited a kind of ‘Madrid Art Academy and Barcellona artworld
anti-art faction’, they were against calm, ordered, sensible and sentimental
art. They were aware of Picasso, Miro and the Paris artscene, collage and
photography so much that cubism to them, was, in being the most recently
established avant garde style, that it was this advanced art that had
become dead, conventional, and must be overthrown for them to make
their own mark. Even this modern art was putrid, rotting and had to be
expunged by shocking devices and strategies. Despite their own
moviemaking and incorporation of photagraphic devices such as in their
own ‘collaging’. Notwithstanding this appreciation and cooptation the
necessity to ‘kill’ the old rot was paramount. For this they armed
themselves with de Sade, Freud and Surrealism.
To create a valid Spanish ‘surrealism’ required an opposite ‘turgid
sentimental realism’ to which their own extreme de Sade hyper-reality
could be opposed. To name the name the name of their own ‘other’ (for all
is ‘other’ to the other; another other-as it were, though not to be too
precious or facetious about this obvious philosophical point) their opposite
numbers were competitively close and almost allied in an overall artworld
project. Yet sufficiently different from their own coalescing creative purpose
as to function fully as ‘other’; another cultural stream that they could
communicate with, understand and debate with. The instrument of that
artistic debate was the abstraction built-into cubism, futurism,
impressionism and expressionism: all of them denying classic codes of
realism, scientific psychology and narrative; all essential ingredients in the
poems, films and drawings they were making. They were a kind of proto-
surrealist group or para-Dada; working alongside a French anti-art
movement from within Spain. Their chosen talisman image was that of
violence, putrefaction, death, deacay and forbidden sexualities. Everything
else was rotten and culturally in a state of decay.
One image in particular would stand out amoung the Orphic encephalic
torsos and knifelike vaginal/female toothed visions such as appears in
‘Honey is Sweeter than Blood’, the ‘San Sebastian’ encephalic drawing
and ‘Apparatus with Hand’. It is the image of the ant strewn corpse, the
ants sucking blood juices from a rotting field donkey in the Catalan
countryside; a scene both Lorca and Dali had frequently seen while out
walking. This putrefaction of ‘the rotting donkey’ kind appears to be a Dali
expression also for what Clement Greenberg would call, in another context,
Kitsch. Although, as one can easily imagine: each today could apply the
term/s to the other. The vividness of this deadly talismanic device and its
equally associated scandalous tropes (encephalic torsos, dead heads,
explicit ‘Freudian’ sex organs, burning objects, random correlations, bodily
distortions and erotic distortions generally) would eventually be the
miniaturist tool to prise open the Parisian artworld to them. The minutiae of
shock and perverse seductions, coprophilic excrement, overt shit and
sabotaging fingerings (as uncovered here) would be his futureanti-art, anti-
research (he failed art theory in the Madrid academy) approach to
conquering the Paris art Gallery world.
In the meantime Barcelona welcomed these newcomers, especially Dali in
his new exhibitions at the druis Gallery……

NOTES

As quoted in haim finkelstein art and writing 1927 1942 salvador vdali
san sebastia letter “this single eye, suddenly enlarged,encompasses a
whole scene of the bottom and surface of an ocean in which all poetic
suggestions navigate, and where all the plastic possibilities are stabilized”
page 30 finkelstein.
1926

31finkelstein)
how ironic then that greenberg may well have thought dalis art putrescent
in both their senses.

Art as the art of looking finlel 321926 circa

Honey is sweeter than blood 1927
apparatus and hand 1927
s

Lorcas exhibit of drawings 1927

lorca acting dead and his head appearing dead in dalis work sweeter b

a putrefied donkey buzzing with small minute hands representing the

beginning of spring 'poem' Gaceta Literaria 1927

soft and hard paradigm 'the sewing needles plunge into small nickels soft
and sweet' 'poem of small things L'Amic de les Arts'
1927

totally anarchic ambiance' pg 42 finkelstein

masson ernst tanguy lorca miro picasso arp

poetic autonomy ... of the image and of the imagination.

the putrefied ass 1928

catalogue note for an arp exhibition by breton 'that canaries never sing sop
well as when placed in the bottom of an aquarium' Oui 1 pg45
fellatio fingering coprophilia anal penetration shitting wounds death killing
putrefaction rotting decay fear of homosexuality yet homoerotic imaginings.
Fratricide encephalic headless heedless masturbation perversion copulation
incest etc molestation absent sex frustration freudian lacan

letting go inhibitions hysteria yet letting go devices for letting go.

Paranoid critical method not 'letting go' no automatism
excrement blood blood tubes vessels spurting droplets/arrows
what is repugnant/yet at bottom, desirable

murder/violence violation

terror fear desire fright sensitivity anal sadistic/masochist domanatrix gala

the 'back' that disdains him so he gets back at the back- rejecting
femininity- by sabotaging imagery; anal fingering and the like. Coded
camoflaged and disguised hidden.

Enlarged hands signifying masturbation 57 finkelstein

erotic provocations / incongruent with their surroundings ie coded/hidden
layered with other more exposed exposures/ explicit overt depravity
disguising misogyny (even from himself) or deliberate to be seen in future
another day = fascism. Counter pose bretons love of women deflected love
for more sympathetic too-close-to-home bataille
bataille thus much more affinity with dalki asthetic and disguises codes and
deeper meanings. A hidden love for women empowered by hatred given
dutch courage out of fear of direct approach in opening stages of
sufferagette age
dihide to hide a secret perversion by a revealed one hidden layers of
meaning

dialectics of the soft and hard hidden and overt perversions

to
1928 arps morphology beautiful
yet e arly in march 1929 script of en chien andalou with bunuel
''
boats vulva vagina uterus womb breasts soft forms
dali publishes article oui1 105 'review of anti-artistic tendencies' march
1929 reviews peret french poems

review of lorcas poetry patina-artificial antique- equals caca or shit waste

products of the past fink 67

dalis 'poetry of the mass manufactured' march 1928

Arte Nouveuuae Collage Freud Bataille Breton Dali other critics art
historians,. Date Barcelona prior.
More beautiful before and after/ more complex characteristic method later
seminal and canononical

History of Dada Surrewalism New York Dada

Paris dada Magazines

Breton

Barcelona why surrealism there?

Barcelona characteristics

Paris reasons for step-up? Pressure of artscene Breton bataille contesting.

Who Breton Philosophy?Who bataille. Philosophy

Batailles illustration

Barcelona pictures plus other 'significant' examples

Prior to Paris 1929 stock market crash. Not so complex imagery collage,
freud etc surrealism

Dalí became intensely interested in film when he was young, going to the
theatre most Sundays. He was part of the era where silent films were
being viewed and drawing on the medium of film became popular. He
believed there were two dimensions to the theories of film and cinema:
"things themselves", the facts that are presented in the world of the camera;
and "photographic imagination", the way the camera shows the picture and
how creative or imaginative it looks.[67] Dalí was active in front of and
behind the scenes in the film world. He created pieces of artwork such as
Destino, on which he collaborated with Walt Disney. He is also credited as
co-creator of Luis Buñuel's surrealist film Un Chien Andalou, a 17-minute
French art film co-written with Luis Buñuel that is widely remembered for
its graphic opening scene simulating the slashing of a human eyeball with a
razor. This film is what Dalí is known for in the independent film world. Un
Chien Andalou was Dalí's way of creating his dreamlike qualities in the real
world. Images would change and scenes would switch, leading the viewer
in a completely different direction from the one they were previously
viewing. The second film he produced with Buñuel was entitled L'Age d'Or,
and it was performed at Studio 28 in Paris in 1930. L'Age d'Or was
"banned for years after fascist and anti-Semitic groups staged a stink bomb
and ink-throwing riot in the Paris theater where it was shown."[68]
Although negative aspects of society were being thrown into the life of Dalí
and obviously affecting the success of his artwork, it did not hold him back
from expressing his own ideas and beliefs in his art. Both of these films,
Un Chien Andalou and L'Age d'Or, have had a tremendous impact on the
independent surrealist film movement. "If Un Chien Andalou stands as the
supreme record of Surrealism's adventures into the realm of the
unconscious, then L'Âge d'Or is perhaps the most trenchant and
implacable expression of its revolutionary intent."[69]

Dalí also worked with other famous filmmakers, such as Alfred Hitchcock.
The most well-known of his film projects is probably the dream sequence
in Hitchcock's Spellbound, which heavily delves into themes of
psychoanalysis. Hitchcock needed a dreamlike quality to his film, which
dealt with the idea that a repressed experience can directly trigger a
neurosis, and he knew that Dalí's work would help create the atmosphere
he wanted in his film. He also worked on a documentary called Chaos and
Creation, which has a lot of artistic references thrown into it to help one
see what Dalí's vision of art really is. He also worked on the Disney short
film production Destino. Completed in 2003 by Baker Bloodworth and Roy
E. Disney, it contains dreamlike images of strange figures flying and
walking about. It is based on Mexican songwriter Armando Dominguez'
song "Destino". When Disney hired Dalí to help produce the film in 1946,
they were not prepared for the work that lay ahead. For eight months, they
continuously animated until their efforts had to come to a stop when they
realized they were in financial trouble. They had no more money to finish
the production of the animated film; however, it was eventually finished and
shown in various film festivals. The film consists of Dalí's artwork
interacting with Disney's character animation. Dalí completed only one
other film in his lifetime, Impressions of Upper Mongolia (1975), in which
he narrated a story about an expedition in search of giant hallucinogenic
mushrooms. The imagery was based on microscopic uric acid stains on the
brass band of a ballpoint pen on which Dalí had been urinating for several
weeks.[70]

PLAN

Proposal Essay Phillip O’Sullivan

Writing Around ‘The Lugubrious Game’ (1929) By Salvador Dali

The Essay Proposal is to examine the Painting 'The Lugubrious Game' By Salvador
Dali at the time of its exhibition in Paris. Responses to the Painting will be looked at,
particularly as in the writings and from the various standpoints, of Andre Breton,
Salvador Dali and Bataille. At least half to two thirds of the essay will cover these
aspects.
Secondarily the surrounding context of surrealism and Marxism (a little) and
Psychology, as in the work of Sigmund Freud will be examined in the light of
Salvador Dali's espoused 'paranoid critical-analytical method'. Bataille’s diagram will
be examined as in this light.
Thirdly the writer will briefly offer his own analysis of the picture, based on the
above and on examining later artworks and views arising out of Salvador Dalis career
and pictorial development in so much as it throws hindsight-insights back into our
combined understanding of the picture. With the belief, that the plain dispute
between Breton and Bataille, has left some oversights and gaps for interpretation,
free of that conflict. There is no necessary art historical need to accept either
Bataille’s or Breton’s views as final and all conclusive. The Essay however will
substantially leave the 'received' interpretations from these sources intact and only
seeks to sketch an exploration of other possibilities.

The principle contention will be the observation of an overall 'back view of a woman
figure' for its overall schema, where the most 'exploded' umbrella-hatted ‘oval shape’
above right comprises the 'head', which we see as if 'inside'. This being consistent
with Dali’s later exploding quantum pictures and with the many 'back views' of
women we see in Dali’s oeuvre. Some other secondary possible interpretations will
also be detailed in regard to these inner features, particularly in regard to Freudian
'oral' understandings; accepting, any lack, or pretence of expert knowledge. However
for the essay, rudimentary research into Freud’s concept of the oral phase will be
outlined. Plainly the painting includes erotic references and notes on fellatio,
cunnilingus, 'phallic' and vaginal symbols, masturbation as well as castration fears
and images; in fact, possibly the whole sexual peccadillo machinery.

The introductions and conclusion of the essay will briefly insert the picture into an art
historical narrative covering both the artist’s career and that of other surrealists, and
within the longer history of weird and perplexing images pertaining to the art canon.

.................................................................................................

NOTES
Coversheet.
Writers Bataille Breton Dali Others secondary
Pictorial analysis.Bataille Dali myself
300 words
Reviewers- historical context concept psychology paranoia method.
 surrealism dada exhibition automatism imagination
Avida dollars he was to become incipient then?
Gathered up in the backwash of Hindsight... Other works like it more clearly in later oeuvre ie
exploded quantum mechanics view and rear end view/face turning away so typical of his work.
Image coded quadrants Batailles schema. Discussed. Gridded Overlooked areas
Egg room Atlas anatomy cerebrum Adolf hitler dildo anal
Methods of seeing hologram mentally generated hologram Duchamp large glass.
Distorting images morph Holbein. Anamorphic images slanted Holbein Ascobobli ? Brueghal?
Heronimous Bosch.Leonardo Ernst De Chirico Carra etc. Weird fantasy history. Aubrey
Beardsley.
3d bifocal image/ double images so painted areas do double or triple visionary duty.
Secret images hidden imagery trick on public... how he fooled the public flirting with fraud.
Scatological/erotic imagery Phillip Trusttrum sideways photographs.
Squinted seeing. Overlapped optically Reversed inverted perverted images rotated
Pictorial criminal treachery. madness

Title Dismal Sport Lugubrious Game Sport with the viewer/critic other artists/ manufactured in full
psychological knowledge in the studio an artwork of tricks. Inserted between two critics.
.....................................................................................................

300 words 263/563 658/ 400 words. 1311words

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
BIBLIOGRAPHY

General Sources
Moorehouse, Paul. Dali 2001 PRC Publishing London
Bradbury, Kirsten. Essential Dali DemseyParr 1999 Bath.
Klingsohr-Leroy, Cathrin. Surrealism Taschen 2005
Romero, Luis. DALI Chartweil Books Seacaucus 1975
Ades, Dawn. Dali Thames & Hudson 1982 London
Naret, Giles. Dali Taschen 2004 Los Angeles.

PRIMARY Source
Finkelstein Haim Salvador Dali's Art and Writings 1927-1942: The Metaphoses of Narcissus
Cambridge University Press 1996
Plus texts in Reader.

Salvador Dalí

This is a Catalan name. The first family name is Dalí and the second is
Domènech.

Salvador Dalí

Salvador Dalí photographed by Carl Van Vechten on November 29, 1939

Birth name Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech

(1904-05-11)

Figueres, Catalonia, Spain

Died January 23, 1989(1989-01-23) (aged 84)

Figueres, Catalonia, Spain

Nationality Spanish

Field Painting, Drawing, Photography, Sculpture, Writing, Film

Training San Fernando School of Fine Arts, Madrid

Movement Cubism, Dada, Surrealism

Works The Persistence of Memory (1931)

Face of Mae West Which May Be Used as an Apartment, (1935)

Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War) (1936)

Swans Reflecting Elephants (1937)

Ballerina in a Death's Head (1939)

Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second

Before Awakening (1944)

The Temptation of St. Anthony (1946)

Galatea of the Spheres (1952)

Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus) (1954)

Salvador Domènec Felip Jacint Dalí i Domènech, Marquis de Púbol (May

11, 1904 – January 23, 1989), commonly known as Salvador Dalí (Catalan
pronunciation: [səɫβəˈðo ðəˈɫi]), was a prominent Spanish surrealist
painter born in Figueres.
Dalí was a skilled draftsman, best known for the striking and bizarre
images in his surrealist work. His painterly skills are often attributed to the
influence of Renaissance masters.[1][2] His best-known work, The
Persistence of Memory, was completed in 1931. Dalí's expansive artistic
repertoire includes film, sculpture, and photography, in collaboration with a
range of artists in a variety of media.

Dalí attributed his "love of everything that is gilded and excessive, my

passion for luxury and my love of oriental clothes"[3] to a self-styled "Arab
lineage," claiming that his ancestors were descended from the Moors.

Dalí was highly imaginative, and also had an affinity for partaking in
unusual and grandiose behavior. His eccentric manner and attention-
grabbing public actions sometimes drew more attention than his artwork to
the dismay of those who held his work in high esteem and to the irritation
of his critics.[4]

Contents

•1 Biography

◦1.1 Early life

◦1.2 Madrid and Paris

◦1.3 1929 through World War II

◦1.4 Later years in Catalonia

•2 Symbolism

•3 Endeavors outside painting

•4 Politics and personality

•5 Legacy

•6 Listing of selected works

◦6.1 Novels

•7 Gallery

•8 See also

•9 Notes

•10 References

•11 External links

[edit] Biography

[edit] Early life

Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech was born on May 11,
1904 at 8:45 am GMT[5] in the town of Figueres, in the Empordà region,
close to the French border in Catalonia, Spain.[6] Dalí's older brother, also
named Salvador (born October 12, 1901), had died of gastroenteritis nine
months earlier, on August 1, 1903. His father, Salvador Dalí i Cusí, was a
middle-class lawyer and notary[7] whose strict disciplinary approach was
tempered by his wife, Felipa Domenech Ferrés, who encouraged her son's
artistic endeavors.[8] When he was five, Dalí was taken to his brother's
grave and told by his parents that he was his brother's reincarnation,[9] a
concept which he came to believe.[10] Of his brother, Dalí said, "...[we]
resembled each other like two drops of water, but we had different
reflections."[11] He "was probably a first version of myself but conceived
too much in the absolute."[11]
Dalí also had a sister, Ana María, who was three years younger.[7] In
1949, she published a book about her brother, Dalí As Seen By His Sister.
[12] His childhood friends included future FC Barcelona footballers
Sagibarba and Josep Samitier. During holidays at the Catalan resort of
Cadaqués, the trio played football together.

Dalí attended drawing school. In 1916, Dalí also discovered modern

painting on a summer vacation trip to Cadaqués with the family of Ramon
Pichot, a local artist who made regular trips to Paris.[7] The next year,
Dalí's father organized an exhibition of his charcoal drawings in their family
home. He had his first public exhibition at the Municipal Theater in
Figueres in 1919.

In February 1921, Dalí's mother died of breast cancer. Dalí was sixteen
years old; he later said his mother's death "was the greatest blow I had
experienced in my life. I worshipped her... I could not resign myself to the
loss of a being on whom I counted to make invisible the unavoidable
blemishes of my soul."[13] After her death, Dalí's father married his
deceased wife's sister. Dalí did not resent this marriage, because he had a
great love and respect for his aunt.[7]

[edit] Madrid and Paris

Wild-eyed antics of Dalí (left) and fellow surrealist artist Man Ray in Paris
on June 16, 1934, photographed by Carl Van Vechten.In 1922, Dalí
moved into the Residencia de Estudiantes (Students' Residence) in
Madrid[7] and studied at the Academia de San Fernando (School of Fine
Arts). A lean 1.72 m (5 ft. 7¾ in.) tall,[14] Dalí already drew attention as
an eccentric and dandy man. He wore long hair and sideburns, coat,
stockings, and knee breeches in the style of English aesthetes of the late
19th century.

At the Residencia, he became close friends with (among others) Pepín

Bello, Luis Buñuel, and Federico García Lorca. The friendship with Lorca
had a strong element of mutual passion,[15] but Dalí rejected the poet's
sexual advances.[16]

However, it was his paintings, in which he experimented with Cubism, that

earned him the most attention from his fellow students. At the time of these
early works, Dalí probably did not completely understand the Cubist
movement. His only information on Cubist art came from magazine articles
and a catalog given to him by Pichot, since there were no Cubist artists in
Madrid at the time. In 1924, the still-unknown Salvador Dalí illustrated a
book for the first time. It was a publication of the Catalan poem "Les
bruixes de Llers" ("The Witches of Llers") by his friend and schoolmate,
poet Carles Fages de Climent. Dalí also experimented with Dada, which
influenced his work throughout his life.

Dalí was expelled from the Academia in 1926, shortly before his final
exams, when he stated that no one on the faculty was competent enough
to examine him.[17] His mastery of painting skills was evidenced by his
realistic Basket of Bread, painted in 1926.[18] That same year, he made
his first visit to Paris, where he met Pablo Picasso, whom the young Dalí
revered. Picasso had already heard favorable reports about Dalí from Joan
Miró. As he developed his own style over the next few years, Dalí made a
number of works heavily influenced by Picasso and Miró.
Some trends in Dalí's work that would continue throughout his life were
already evident in the 1920s. Dalí devoured influences from many styles of
art, ranging from the most academically classic to the most cutting-edge
avant garde.[19] His classical influences included Raphael, Bronzino,
Francisco de Zurbaran, Vermeer, and Velázquez.[20] He used both
classical and modernist techniques, sometimes in separate works, and
sometimes combined. Exhibitions of his works in Barcelona attracted much
attention along with mixtures of praise and puzzled debate from critics.

Dalí grew a flamboyant moustache, influenced by seventeenth-century

Spanish master painter Diego Velázquez. The moustache became an
iconic trademark of his appearance for the rest of his life.

[edit] 1929 through World War II

In 1929, Dalí collaborated with surrealist film director Luis Buñuel on the
short film Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog). His main contribution
was to help Buñuel write the script for the film. Dalí later claimed to have
also played a significant role in the filming of the project, but this is not
substantiated by contemporary accounts.[21] Also, in August 1929, Dalí
met his muse, inspiration, and future wife Gala,[22] born Elena Ivanovna
Diakonova. She was a Russian immigrant ten years his senior, who at that
time was married to surrealist poet Paul Éluard. In the same year, Dalí had
important professional exhibitions and officially joined the Surrealist group
in the Montparnasse quarter of Paris. His work had already been heavily
influenced by surrealism for two years. The Surrealists hailed what Dalí
called the paranoiac-critical method of accessing the subconscious for
greater artistic creativity.[7][8]

Meanwhile, Dalí's relationship with his father was close to rupture. Don
Salvador Dalí y Cusi strongly disapproved of his son's romance with Gala,
and saw his connection to the Surrealists as a bad influence on his morals.
The last straw was when Don Salvador read in a Barcelona newspaper that
his son had recently exhibited in Paris a drawing of the "Sacred Heart of
Jesus Christ", with a provocative inscription: "Sometimes, I spit for fun on
my mother's portrait."[23]

Outraged, Don Salvador demanded that his son recant publicly. Dalí
refused, perhaps out of fear of expulsion from the Surrealist group, and
was violently thrown out of his paternal home on December 28, 1929. His
father told him that he would disinherit him, and that he should never set
foot in Cadaquès again. The following summer, Dalí and Gala rented a
small fisherman's cabin in a nearby bay at Port Lligat. He bought the place,
and over the years enlarged it, gradually building his much beloved villa by
the sea.

The Persistence of MemoryIn 1931, Dalí painted one of his most famous
works, The Persistence of Memory,[24] which introduced a surrealistic
image of soft, melting pocket watches. The general interpretation of the
work is that the soft watches are a rejection of the assumption that time is
rigid or deterministic. This idea is supported by other images in the work,
such as the wide expanding landscape, and the other limp watches, shown
being devoured by ants.[25]

Dalí and Gala, having lived together since 1929, were married in 1934 in a
civil ceremony. They later remarried in a Catholic ceremony in 1958.
Dalí was introduced to America by art dealer Julian Levy in 1934. The
exhibition in New York of Dalí's works, including Persistence of Memory,
created an immediate sensation. Social Register listees feted him at a
specially organized "Dalí Ball." He showed up wearing a glass case on his
chest, which contained a brassiere.[26] In that year, Dalí and Gala also
attended a masquerade party in New York, hosted for them by heiress
Caresse Crosby. For their costumes, they dressed as the Lindbergh baby
and his kidnapper. The resulting uproar in the press was so great that Dalí
apologized. When he returned to Paris, the Surrealists confronted him
about his apology for a surrealist act.[27]

While the majority of the Surrealist artists had become increasingly

associated with leftist politics, Dalí maintained an ambiguous position on
the subject of the proper relationship between politics and art. Leading
surrealist André Breton accused Dalí of defending the "new" and "irrational"
in "the Hitler phenomenon," but Dalí quickly rejected this claim, saying, "I
am Hitlerian neither in fact nor intention."[28] Dalí insisted that surrealism
could exist in an apolitical context and refused to explicitly denounce
fascism.[citation needed] Among other factors, this had landed him in
trouble with his colleagues. Later in 1934, Dalí was subjected to a "trial", in
which he was formally expelled from the Surrealist group.[22] To this, Dal í
retorted, "I myself am surrealism."[17]

In 1936, Dalí took part in the London International Surrealist Exhibition. His
lecture, entitled Fantomes paranoiaques authentiques, was delivered while
wearing a deep-sea diving suit and helmet.[29] He had arrived carrying a
billiard cue and leading a pair of Russian wolfhounds, and had to have the
helmet unscrewed as he gasped for breath. He commented that "I just
wanted to show that I was 'plunging deeply' into the human mind."[30]
Also in 1936, at the premiere screening of Joseph Cornell's film Rose
Hobart at Julian Levy's gallery in New York City, Dalí became famous for
another incident. Levy's program of short surrealist films was timed to take
place at the same time as the first surrealism exhibition at the Museum of
Modern Art, featuring Dalí's work. Dalí was in the audience at the
screening, but halfway through the film, he knocked over the projector in a
rage. “My idea for a film is exactly that, and I was going to propose it to
someone who would pay to have it made,” he said. "I never wrote it down
or told anyone, but it is as if he had stolen it." Other versions of Dalí's
accusation tend to the more poetic: "He stole it from my subconscious!" or
even "He stole my dreams!"[31]

At this stage, Dalí's main patron in London was the very wealthy Edward
James. He had helped Dalí emerge into the art world by purchasing many
works and by supporting him financially for two years. They also
collaborated on two of the most enduring icons of the Surrealist movement:
the Lobster Telephone and the Mae West Lips Sofa.[citation needed]

In 1938, Dalí met Sigmund Freud thanks to Stefan Zweig. Later, in

September 1938, Salvador Dalí was invited by Gabrielle Coco Chanel to
her house La Pausa in Roquebrune on the French Riviera. There he
painted numerous paintings he later exhibited at Julien Levy Gallery in New
York.[32][33] La Pausa has been partially replicated at the Dallas Museum
of Art to welcome the Reves collection and part of Chanel's original
furniture for the house.[34]

In 1939, Breton coined the derogatory nickname "Avida Dollars", an

anagram for Salvador Dalí, and a phonetic rendering of the French avide à
dollars, which may be translated as "eager for dollars".[35] This was a
derisive reference to the increasing commercialization of Dalí's work, and
the perception that Dalí sought self-aggrandizement through fame and
fortune. Some surrealists henceforth spoke of Dalí in the past tense, as if
he were dead.[citation needed] The Surrealist movement and various
members thereof (such as Ted Joans) would continue to issue extremely
harsh polemics against Dalí until the time of his death and beyond.

In 1940, as World War II was in full swing at Europe, Dalí and Gala moved
to the United States, where they lived for eight years. After the move, Dalí
returned to the practice of Catholicism. "During this period, Dalí never
stopped writing," wrote Robert and Nicolas Descharnes.[36]

In 1941, Dalí drafted a film scenario for Jean Gabin called Moontide. In
1942, he published his autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí. He
wrote catalogs for his exhibitions, such as that at the Knoedler Gallery in
New York in 1943. Therein he expounded, "Surrealism will at least have
served to give experimental proof that total sterility and attempts at
automatizations have gone too far and have led to a totalitarian system. ...
Today's laziness and the total lack of technique have reached their
paroxysm in the psychological signification of the current use of the
college." He also wrote a novel, published in 1944, about a fashion salon
for automobiles. This resulted in a drawing by Edwin Cox in The Miami
Herald, depicting Dalí dressing an automobile in an evening gown.[36] Also
in The Secret Life, Dalí suggested that he had split with Buñuel because
the latter was a Communist and an atheist. Buñuel was fired (or resigned)
from MOMA, supposedly after Cardinal Spellman of New York went to see
Iris Barry, head of the film department at MOMA. Buñuel then went back to
Hollywood where he worked in the dubbing department of Warner Bros.
from 1942 to 1946. In his 1982 autobiography Mon Dernier soupir (English
translation My Last Sigh published 1983), Buñuel wrote that, over the
years, he rejected Dalí's attempts at reconciliation.[37]
An Italian friar, Gabriele Maria Berardi, claimed to have performed an
exorcism on Dalí while he was in France in 1947.[38] In 2005, a sculpture
of Christ on the Cross was discovered in the friar's estate. It had been
claimed that Dalí gave this work to his exorcist out of gratitude,[38] and two
Spanish art experts confirmed that there were adequate stylistic reasons to
believe the sculpture was made by Dalí.[38]

[edit] Later years in Catalonia

Starting in 1949, Dalí spent his remaining years back in his beloved
Catalonia. The fact that he chose to live in Spain while it was ruled by
Franco drew criticism from progressives and from many other artists.[39]
As such, it is probable that the common dismissal of Dalí's later works by
some Surrealists and art critics was related partially to politics rather than
to the artistic merit of the works themselves. In 1959, André Breton
organized an exhibit called Homage to Surrealism, celebrating the fortieth
anniversary of Surrealism, which contained works by Dalí, Joan Miró,
Enrique Tábara, and Eugenio Granell. Breton vehemently fought against
the inclusion of Dalí's Sistine Madonna in the International Surrealism
Exhibition in New York the following year.[40]

Late in his career, Dalí did not confine himself to painting, but
experimented with many unusual or novel media and processes: he made
bulletist works[41] and was among the first artists to employ holography in
an artistic manner.[42] Several of his works incorporate optical illusions. In
his later years, young artists such as Andy Warhol proclaimed Dalí an
important influence on pop art.[43] Dalí also had a keen interest in natural
science and mathematics. This is manifested in several of his paintings,
notably in the 1950s, in which he painted his subjects as composed of
rhinoceros horns. According to Dalí, the rhinoceros horn signifies divine
geometry because it grows in a logarithmic spiral. He also linked the
rhinoceros to themes of chastity and to the Virgin Mary.[44] Dalí was also
fascinated by DNA and the hypercube (a 4-dimensional cube); an
unfolding of a hypercube is featured in the painting Crucifixion (Corpus
Hypercubus).

Dalí's post–World War II period bore the hallmarks of technical virtuosity

and an interest in optical illusions, science, and religion. He became an
increasingly devout Catholic, while at the same time he had been inspired
by the shock of Hiroshima and the dawning of the "atomic age". Therefore
Dalí labeled this period "Nuclear Mysticism." In paintings such as "The
Madonna of Port-Lligat" (first version) (1949) and "Corpus Hypercubus"
(1954), Dalí sought to synthesize Christian iconography with images of
material disintegration inspired by nuclear physics.[45] "Nuclear Mysticism"
included such notable pieces as La Gare de Perpignan (1965) and The
Hallucinogenic Toreador (1968–70). In 1960, Dalí began work on the Dalí
Theatre and Museum in his home town of Figueres; it was his largest
single project and the main focus of his energy through 1974. He
continued to make additions through the mid-1980s.[citation needed]

In 1968, Dalí filmed a humorous television advertisement for Lanvin

chocolates.[46] In this, he proclaims in French "Je suis fou de chocolat
Lanvin!" (I'm crazy about Lanvin chocolate) while biting a morsel causing
him to become crosseyed and his moustache to swivel upwards. In 1969,
he designed the Chupa Chups logo in addition to facilitating the design of
the advertising campaign for the 1969 Eurovision Song Contest and
creating a large on-stage metal sculpture that stood at the Teatro Real in
Madrid.
Dalí in 1972.In the television programme Dirty Dalí: A Private View
broadcast on Channel 4 on June 3, 2007, art critic Brian Sewell described
his acquaintance with Dalí in the late 1960s, which included lying down in
the fetal position without trousers in the armpit of a figure of Christ and
masturbating for Dalí, who pretended to take photos while fumbling in his
own trousers.[47][48]

In 1980, Dalí's health took a catastrophic turn. His near-senile wife, Gala,
allegedly had been dosing him with a dangerous cocktail of unprescribed
medicine that damaged his nervous system, thus causing an untimely end
to his artistic capacity. At 76 years old, Dalí was a wreck, and his right
hand trembled terribly, with Parkinson-like symptoms.[49]

In 1982, King Juan Carlos bestowed on Dalí the title of Marqués de Dalí
de Púbol[50][51] (English: Marquis of Dalí de Púbol) in the nobility of
Spain, hereby referring to Púbol, the place where he lived. The title was in
first instance hereditary, but on request of Dalí changed for life only in
1983.[50] To show his gratitude for this, Dalí later gave the king a drawing
(Head of Europa, which would turn out to be Dalí's final drawing) after the
king visited him on his deathbed.

Sant Pere in Figueres, scene of Dalí's Baptism, First Communion, and

funeral

Dalí Theatre and Museum in Figueres, where he is also buried

Dalí's crypt at the Dalí Theatre and Museum in Figueres, stating his
titlesGala died on June 10, 1982. After Gala's death, Dalí lost much of his
will to live. He deliberately dehydrated himself, possibly as a suicide
attempt, or perhaps in an attempt to put himself into a state of suspended
animation as he had read that some microorganisms could do. He moved
from Figueres to the castle in Púbol, which he had bought for Gala and
was the site of her death. In 1984, a fire broke out in his bedroom[52]
under unclear circumstances. It was possibly a suicide attempt by Dalí, or
possibly simple negligence by his staff.[17] In any case, Dalí was rescued
and returned to Figueres, where a group of his friends, patrons, and fellow
artists saw to it that he was comfortable living in his Theater-Museum in
his final years.

There have been allegations that Dalí was forced by his guardians to sign
blank canvases that would later, even after his death, be used in forgeries
and sold as originals.[53] As a result, art dealers tend to be wary of late
works attributed to Dalí.[citation needed]

In November 1988, Dalí entered the hospital with heart failure, and on
December 5, 1988 was visited by King Juan Carlos, who confessed that he
had always been a serious devotee of Dalí.[54]

On January 23, 1989, while his favorite record of Tristan and Isolde
played, he died of heart failure at Figueres at the age of 84, and, coming
full circle, is buried in the crypt of his Teatro Museo in Figueres. The
location is across the street from the church of Sant Pere, where he had
his baptism, first communion, and funeral, and is three blocks from the
house where he was born.[55]
The Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation currently serves as his official estate.
[56] The U.S. copyright representative for the Gala-Salvador Dalí
Foundation is the Artists Rights Society.[57] In 2002, the Society made the
news when they asked Google to remove a customized version of its logo
put up to commemorate Dalí, alleging that portions of specific artworks
under their protection had been used without permission. Google complied
with the request, but denied that there was any copyright violation.[citation
needed]

[edit] Symbolism

Dalí employed extensive symbolism in his work. For instance, the hallmark
"soft watches" that first appear in The Persistence of Memory suggest
Einstein's theory that time is relative and not fixed.[25] The idea for clocks
functioning symbolically in this way came to Dalí when he was staring at a
runny piece of Camembert cheese on a hot day in August.[58]

The elephant is also a recurring image in Dalí's works. It first appeared in

his 1944 work Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a
Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening. The elephants, inspired by
Gian Lorenzo Bernini's sculpture base in Rome of an elephant carrying an
ancient obelisk,[59] are portrayed "with long, multijointed, almost invisible
legs of desire"[60] along with obelisks on their backs. Coupled with the
image of their brittle legs, these encumbrances, noted for their phallic
overtones, create a sense of phantom reality. "The elephant is a distortion
in space," one analysis explains, "its spindly legs contrasting the idea of
weightlessness with structure."[60] "I am painting pictures which make me
die for joy, I am creating with an absolute naturalness, without the slightest
aesthetic concern, I am making things that inspire me with a profound
emotion and I am trying to paint them honestly." —Salvador Dalí, in Dawn
Ades, Dalí and Surrealism.
The egg is another common Dalíesque image. He connects the egg to the
prenatal and intrauterine, thus using it to symbolize hope and love;[61] it
appears in The Great Masturbator and The Metamorphosis of Narcissus.
The Metamorphosis of Narcissus also symbolized death and petrification.
Various animals appear throughout his work as well: ants point to death,
decay, and immense sexual desire; the snail is connected to the human
head (he saw a snail on a bicycle outside Freud's house when he first met
Sigmund Freud); and locusts are a symbol of waste and fear.[61]

[edit] Endeavors outside painting

The Dali Atomicus, photo by Philippe Halsman (1948), shown before its
supporting wires were removed.Dalí was a versatile artist. Some of his
more popular works are sculptures and other objects, and he is also noted
for his contributions to theatre, fashion, and photography, among other
areas.

Two of the most popular objects of the surrealist movement were Lobster
Telephone and Mae West Lips Sofa, completed by Dalí in 1936 and 1937,
respectively. Surrealist artist and patron Edward James commissioned both
of these pieces from Dalí; James inherited a large English estate in West
Dean, West Sussex when he was five and was one of the foremost
supporters of the surrealists in the 1930s.[62] "Lobsters and telephones
had strong sexual connotations for [Dalí]," according to the display caption
for the Lobster Telephone at the Tate Gallery, "and he drew a close
analogy between food and sex."[63] The telephone was functional, and
James purchased four of them from Dalí to replace the phones in his
retreat home. One now appears at the Tate Gallery; the second can be
found at the German Telephone Museum in Frankfurt; the third belongs to
the Edward James Foundation; and the fourth is at the National Gallery of
Australia.[62]

The wood and satin Mae West Lips Sofa was shaped after the lips of
actress Mae West, whom Dalí apparently found fascinating.[22] West was
previously the subject of Dalí's 1935 painting The Face of Mae West. Mae
West Lips Sofa currently resides at the Brighton and Hove Museum in
England.

Between 1941 and 1970, Dalí created an ensemble of 39 jewels. The

jewels are intricate, and some contain moving parts. The most famous
jewel, "The Royal Heart", is made of gold and is encrusted with 46 rubies,
42 diamonds, and four emeralds and is created in such a way that the
center "beats" much like a real heart. Dalí himself commented that "Without
an audience, without the presence of spectators, these jewels would not
fulfill the function for which they came into being. The viewer, then, is the
ultimate artist." (Dalí, 1959.) The "Dalí – Joies" ("The Jewels of Dal í")
collection can be seen at the Dalí Theater Museum in Figueres, Catalonia,
Spain, where it is on permanent exhibition.

In theatre, Dalí constructed the scenery for Federico García Lorca's 1927
romantic play Mariana Pineda.[64] For Bacchanale (1939), a ballet based
on and set to the music of Richard Wagner's 1845 opera Tannhäuser, Dalí
provided both the set design and the libretto.[65] Bacchanale was followed
by set designs for Labyrinth in 1941 and The Three-Cornered Hat in 1949.
[66]

Dalí became intensely interested in film when he was young, going to the
theatre most Sundays. He was part of the era where silent films were
being viewed and drawing on the medium of film became popular. He
believed there were two dimensions to the theories of film and cinema:
"things themselves", the facts that are presented in the world of the camera;
and "photographic imagination", the way the camera shows the picture and
how creative or imaginative it looks.[67] Dalí was active in front of and
behind the scenes in the film world. He created pieces of artwork such as
Destino, on which he collaborated with Walt Disney. He is also credited as
co-creator of Luis Buñuel's surrealist film Un Chien Andalou, a 17-minute
French art film co-written with Luis Buñuel that is widely remembered for
its graphic opening scene simulating the slashing of a human eyeball with a
razor. This film is what Dalí is known for in the independent film world. Un
Chien Andalou was Dalí's way of creating his dreamlike qualities in the real
world. Images would change and scenes would switch, leading the viewer
in a completely different direction from the one they were previously
viewing. The second film he produced with Buñuel was entitled L'Age d'Or,
and it was performed at Studio 28 in Paris in 1930. L'Age d'Or was
"banned for years after fascist and anti-Semitic groups staged a stink bomb
and ink-throwing riot in the Paris theater where it was shown."[68]
Although negative aspects of society were being thrown into the life of Dalí
and obviously affecting the success of his artwork, it did not hold him back
from expressing his own ideas and beliefs in his art. Both of these films,
Un Chien Andalou and L'Age d'Or, have had a tremendous impact on the
independent surrealist film movement. "If Un Chien Andalou stands as the
supreme record of Surrealism's adventures into the realm of the
unconscious, then L'Âge d'Or is perhaps the most trenchant and
implacable expression of its revolutionary intent."[69]

Dalí also worked with other famous filmmakers, such as Alfred Hitchcock.
The most well-known of his film projects is probably the dream sequence
in Hitchcock's Spellbound, which heavily delves into themes of
psychoanalysis. Hitchcock needed a dreamlike quality to his film, which
dealt with the idea that a repressed experience can directly trigger a
neurosis, and he knew that Dalí's work would help create the atmosphere
he wanted in his film. He also worked on a documentary called Chaos and
Creation, which has a lot of artistic references thrown into it to help one
see what Dalí's vision of art really is. He also worked on the Disney short
film production Destino. Completed in 2003 by Baker Bloodworth and Roy
E. Disney, it contains dreamlike images of strange figures flying and
walking about. It is based on Mexican songwriter Armando Dominguez'
song "Destino". When Disney hired Dalí to help produce the film in 1946,
they were not prepared for the work that lay ahead. For eight months, they
continuously animated until their efforts had to come to a stop when they
realized they were in financial trouble. They had no more money to finish
the production of the animated film; however, it was eventually finished and
shown in various film festivals. The film consists of Dalí's artwork
interacting with Disney's character animation. Dalí completed only one
other film in his lifetime, Impressions of Upper Mongolia (1975), in which
he narrated a story about an expedition in search of giant hallucinogenic
mushrooms. The imagery was based on microscopic uric acid stains on the
brass band of a ballpoint pen on which Dalí had been urinating for several
weeks.[70]

Dalí built a repertoire in the fashion and photography industries as well. In

fashion, his cooperation with Italian fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli is
well-known, where Dalí was hired by Schiaparelli to produce a white dress
with a lobster print. Other designs Dalí made for her include a shoe-
shaped hat and a pink belt with lips for a buckle. He was also involved in
creating textile designs and perfume bottles. In 1950, Dalí created a
special "costume for the year 2045" with Christian Dior.[65] Photographers
with whom he collaborated include Man Ray, Brassaï, Cecil Beaton, and
Philippe Halsman.

With Man Ray and Brassaï, Dalí photographed nature; with the others, he
explored a range of obscure topics, including (with Halsman) the Dalí
Atomica series (1948)—inspired by his painting Leda Atomica — which in
one photograph depicts "a painter's easel, three cats, a bucket of water,
and Dalí himself floating in the air."[65]

References to Dalí in the context of science are made in terms of his

fascination with the paradigm shift that accompanied the birth of quantum
mechanics in the twentieth century. Inspired by Werner Heisenberg's
Uncertainty Principle, in 1958 he wrote in his "Anti-Matter Manifesto": "In
the Surrealist period, I wanted to create the iconography of the interior
world and the world of the marvelous, of my father Freud. Today, the
exterior world and that of physics has transcended the one of psychology.
My father today is Dr. Heisenberg."[71]

In this respect, The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory, which

appeared in 1954, in hearkening back to The Persistence of Memory, and
in portraying that painting in fragmentation and disintegration summarizes
Dalí's acknowledgment of the new science.[71]

Architectural achievements include his Port Lligat house near Cadaqués, as

well as the Dream of Venus surrealist pavilion at the 1939 World's Fair,
which contained within it a number of unusual sculptures and statues. His
literary works include The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (1942), Diary of a
Genius (1952–63), and Oui: The Paranoid-Critical Revolution (1927–33).
The artist worked extensively in the graphic arts, producing many etchings
and lithographs. While his early work in printmaking is equal in quality to
his important paintings as he grew older, he would sell the rights to images
but not be involved in the print production itself. In addition, a large number
of unauthorized fakes were produced in the eighties and nineties, thus
further confusing the Dalí print market. He took a stab at industrial design
in the 1970s with a 500-piece run of the upscale Suomi tableware by Timo
Sarpaneva that Dalí decorated for the German Rosenthal porcelain maker's
Studio Linie.[72]
One of Dalí's most unorthodox artistic creations may have been an entire
person. At a French nightclub in 1965, Dalí met Amanda Lear, a fashion
model then known as Peki D'Oslo.[73] Lear became his protégé and muse,
[73] writing about their affair in the authorized biography My Life With Dalí
(1986).[74] Transfixed by the mannish, larger-than-life Lear, Dalí
masterminded her successful transition from modeling to the music world,
advising her on self-presentation and helping spin mysterious stories about
her origin as she took the disco-art scene by storm. According to Lear, she
and Dalí were united in a "spiritual marriage" on a deserted mountaintop.
[73] Referred to as Dalí's "Frankenstein,"[75] some believe Lear's name is a
pun on the French "L'Amant Dalí," or Lover of Dalí. Lear took the place of
an earlier muse, Ultra Violet (Isabelle Collin Dufresne), who had left Dal í's
side to join The Factory of Andy Warhol.[76]

An avid cheese maker, Dali would sometimes engross himself in cheese-

making for over 4 months at a time. His favorite cheese was swiss.[citation
needed]

[edit] Politics and personality

Dalí in the 1960s wearing the flamboyant mustache style he

popularized.Salvador Dalí's politics played a significant role in his
emergence as an artist. In his youth, he embraced both anarchism and
communism, though his writings account anecdotes of making radical
political statements more to shock listeners than from any deep conviction.
This was in keeping with Dalí's allegiance to the Dada movement.
As he grew older his political allegiances changed, especially as the
Surrealist movement went through transformations under the leadership of
Trotskyist André Breton, who is said to have called Dalí in for questioning
on his politics. In his 1970 book Dalí by Dalí, Dalí was declaring himself an
anarchist and monarchist.

With the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Dalí fled from fighting and
refused to align himself with any group. Likewise, after World War II,
George Orwell criticized Dalí for "scuttling off like a rat as soon as France
is in danger" after Dalí prospered there for years: "When the European War
approaches he has one preoccupation only: how to find a place which has
good cookery and from which he can make a quick bolt if danger comes
too near." In a notable 1944 review of Dalí's autobiography, Orwell wrote,
"One ought to be able to hold in one's head simultaneously the two facts
that Dalí is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being."[77]

After his return to Catalonia after World War II, Dalí became closer to the
authoritarian Franco regime. Some of Dalí's statements supported the
Franco regime, congratulating Franco for his actions aimed "at clearing
Spain of destructive forces."[39] Dalí, having returned to the Catholic faith
and becoming increasingly religious as time went on, may have been
referring to the Republican atrocities during the Spanish Civil War.[78][79]
Dalí sent telegrams to Franco, praising him for signing death warrants for
prisoners.[39] He even met Franco personally[80] and painted a portrait of
Franco's granddaughter.

He also once sent a telegram praising the Conducător, Romanian

Communist leader Nicolae Ceauşescu, for his adoption of a scepter as part
of his regalia. The Romanian daily newspaper Scînteia published it, without
suspecting its mocking aspect. One of Dalí's few possible bits of open
disobedience was his continued praise of Federico García Lorca even in
the years when Lorca's works were banned.[not in citation given][16]

Dalí, a colorful and imposing presence in his ever-present long cape,

walking stick, haughty expression, and upturned waxed mustache, was
famous for having said that "every morning upon awakening, I experience a
supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dalí."[81] The entertainer Cher
and her husband Sonny Bono, when young, came to a party at Dalí's
expensive residence in New York's Plaza Hotel and were startled when
Cher sat down on an oddly shaped sexual vibrator left in an easy chair.
When signing autographs for fans, Dalí would always keep their pens.
When interviewed by Mike Wallace on his 60 Minutes television show, Dalí
kept referring to himself in the third person, and told the startled Mr.
Wallace matter-of-factly that "Dalí is immortal and will not die." During
another television appearance, on The Tonight Show, Dalí carried with him
a leather rhinoceros and refused to sit upon anything else.[citation needed]

[edit] Legacy

Salvador Dalí has been cited as major inspiration from many modern
artists, such as Damien Hirst, Noel Fielding, Jeff Koons and most other
modern surrealists. Salvador Dali's manic expression and famous
moustache have made him something of a Cult icon for the bizarre &
surreal.

[edit] Listing of selected works

Main article: List of works by Salvador Dalí

The Philadelphia Museum of Art used a surreal entrance display including

its steps, for the 2005 Salvador Dalí exhibitionDalí produced over 1,500
paintings in his career[82] in addition to producing illustrations for books,
lithographs, designs for theatre sets and costumes, a great number of
drawings, dozens of sculptures, and various other projects, including an
animated short film for Disney. He also collaborated with director Jack
Bond in 1965, creating a movie titled Dalí in New York. Below is a
chronological sample of important and representative work, as well as
some notes on what Dalí did in particular years.[2]

In Carlos Lozano's biography, Sex, Surrealism, Dalí, and Me, produced

with the collaboration of Clifford Thurlow, Lozano makes it clear that Dalí
never stopped being a surrealist. As Dalí said of himself: "the only
difference between me and the surrealists is that I am a surrealist."[35]

•1910 Landscape Near Figueras

•1913 Vilabertin

•1916 Fiesta in Figueras (begun 1914)

•1917 View of Cadaqués with Shadow of Mount Pani

•1918 Crepuscular Old Man (begun 1917)

•1919 Port of Cadaqués (Night) (begun 1918) and Self-portrait in the

Studio

•1920 The Artist's Father at Llane Beach and View of Portdogué (Port
Aluger)
•1921 The Garden of Llaner (Cadaqués) (begun 1920) and Self-portrait

•1922 Cabaret Scene and Night Walking Dreams

•1923 Self Portrait with L'Humanite and Cubist Self Portrait with La
Publicitat

•1924 Still Life (Syphon and Bottle of Rum) (for García Lorca) and Portrait
of Luis Buñuel

•1925 Large Harlequin and Small Bottle of Rum and a series of fine
portraits of his sister Anna Maria, most notably Figure at a Window

•1926 The Basket of Bread and Girl from Figueres

•1927 Composition with Three Figures (Neo-Cubist Academy) and Honey

is Sweeter than Blood (his first important surrealist work)

•1929 Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog) film in collaboration with

Luis Buñuel, The Lugubrious Game, The Great Masturbator, The First
Days of Spring, and The Profanation of the Host

•1930 L'Age d'Or (The Golden Age) film in collaboration with Luis Buñuel

•1931 The Persistence of Memory (his most famous work, featuring the
"melting clocks"), The Old Age of William Tell, and William Tell and Gradiva

•1932 The Spectre of Sex Appeal, The Birth of Liquid Desires,

Anthropomorphic Bread, and Fried Eggs on the Plate without the Plate.
The Invisible Man (begun 1929) completed (although not to Dalí's own
satisfaction)

•1933 Retrospective Bust of a Woman (mixed media sculpture collage) and

Portrait of Gala With Two Lamb Chops Balanced on Her Shoulder, Gala in
the Window

•1934 The Ghost of Vermeer of Delft Which Can Be Used As a Table and
A Sense of Speed
•1935 Archaeological Reminiscence of Millet's Angelus and The Face of
Mae West

•1936 Autumn Cannibalism, Lobster Telephone, Soft Construction with

Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War) and two works titled Morphological
Echo (the first of which began in 1934)

•1937 Metamorphosis of Narcissus, Swans Reflecting Elephants, The

Burning Giraffe, Sleep, The Enigma of Hitler, Mae West Lips Sofa and
Cannibalism in Autumn

•1938 The Sublime Moment and Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on a
Beach

•1939 Shirley Temple, The Youngest, Most Sacred Monster of the Cinema
in Her Time

•1940 Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire, The Face of
War

•1941 Honey is Sweeter than Blood

•1943 The Poetry of America and Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of
the New Man

•1944 Galarina and Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a

Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening

•1944–48 Hidden Faces, a novel

•1945, Basket of Bread—Rather Death than Shame and Fountain of Milk

Flowing Uselessly on Three Shoes; also this year, Dalí collaborated with
Alfred Hitchcock on a dream sequence to the film Spellbound, to mutual
dissatisfaction

•1946 The Temptation of St. Anthony

•1948 Les Elephants

•1949 Leda Atomica and The Madonna of Port Lligat. Dalí returned to
Catalonia this year

•1951 Christ of Saint John of the Cross and Exploding Raphaelesque Head

•1951 Katharine Cornell, a portrait of the famed actress

•1952 Galatea of the Spheres

•1954 The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory (begun in 1952),

Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus) and Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by the
Horns of Her Own Chastity

•1955 The Sacrament of the Last Supper, Lonesome Echo, record album
cover for Jackie Gleason

•1956 Still Life Moving Fast, Rinoceronte vestido con puntillas

•1957 Santiago el Grande oil on canvas on permanent display at

Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton, NB, Canada

•1958 The Meditative Rose

•1959 The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus

•1960 Composición Numérica (de fond préparatoire inachevé)

•1960 Dalí began work on the Teatro-Museo Gala Salvador Dalí and
Portrait of Juan de Pareja, the Assistant to Velázquez

•1963–1964 They Will All Come from Saba a work in water color depicting
the Magi at St. Petersbur's Dali Museum

•1965 Dalí donates a gouache, ink and pencil drawing of the Crucifixion to
the Rikers Island jail in New York City. The drawing hung in the inmate
dining room from 1965 to 1981[83]

•1965 Dalí in New York

•1967 Tuna Fishing

•1969 Chupa Chups logo

•1969 – Improvisation on a Sunday Afternoon, television collaboration with

the rock group Nirvana

•1970 The Hallucinogenic Toreador, acquired in 1969 by A. Reynolds

Morse & Eleanor R. Morse before it was completed

•1972 La Toile Daligram, Helena Devulina Diakanoff – dit., GALA

•1973 "Le Diners De Gala", an ornately illustrated cook book

•1976 Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean Sea

•1977 Dalí's Hand Drawing Back the Golden Fleece in the Form of a Cloud
to Show Gala Completely Nude, Very Far Away Behind the Sun
(stereoscopical pair of paintings)

•1983 Dalí completes his final painting, The Swallow's Tail

•2003 Destino, an animated short film originally a collaboration between

Dalí and Walt Disney, is released. Production on Destino began in 1945

The largest collections of Dalí's work are at the Dalí Theatre and Museum
in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain, followed by the Salvador Dalí Museum in St.
Petersburg, Florida, which contains the collection of A. Reynolds Morse &
Eleanor R. Morse. It holds over 1,500 works from Dalí. Other particularly
significant collections include the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid and the
Salvador Dalí Gallery in Pacific Palisades, California. Espace Dalí in
Montmartre, Paris, France, as well as the Dalí Universe in London,
England, contain a large collection of his drawings and sculptures.

The unlikeliest venue for Dalí's work was the Rikers Island jail in New York
City; a sketch of the Crucifixion he donated to the jail hung in the inmate
dining room for 16 years before it was moved to the prison lobby for
safekeeping. Ironically, the drawing was stolen from that location in March
2003 and has not been recovered.[83]
[edit] Novels

Under the encouragement of poet Federico García Lorca, Dalí attempted

an approach to a literary career through the means of the "pure novel". In
his only literary production, Hidden Faces (1944), Dalí describes, in vividly
visual terms, the intrigues and love affairs of a group of dazzling, eccentric
aristocrats who, with their luxurious and extravagant lifestyle, symbolize the
decadence of the 1930s.

[edit] Gallery

•Gala in the Window (1933)

Marbella.

•Rinoceronte vestido con puntillas (1956)

Puerto José Banús.

•Homage to Newton (1985)

Signed and numbered cast no. 5/8. Bronze with dark patina.

Size: 388 x 210 x 133cm.

UOB Plaza, Singapore

Dalí's homage to Newton, with an open torso and suspended heart to

indicate "open-heartedness," and an open head indicating "open-
mindedness"—

the two very qualities important for science discovery and successful
human endeavours.

•Children at Dali's exhibition in Sakıp Sabancı Museum, Istanbul

[edit] See also

•Little Ashes

[edit] Notes

1.^ "Phelan, Joseph, ',The Salvador Dalí Show". Artcyclopedia.com.

http://www.artcyclopedia.com/feature-2005-03.html. Retrieved 2010-08-
22.

2.^ a b Dalí, Salvador. (2000) Dalí: 16 Art Stickers, Courier Dover

Publications. ISBN 0-486-41074-9.

3.^ Ian Gibson (1997). The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí. W. W. Norton
& Company. http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/g/gibson-dali.html.
Gibson found out that "Dalí" (and its many variants) is an extremely
common surname in Arab countries like Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria or Egypt.
On the other hand, also according to Gibson, Dalí's mother family, the
Domènech of Barcelona, had Jewish roots.

4.^ Saladyga, Stephen Francis. "The Mindset of Salvador Dalí". lamplighter

(Niagara University). Vol. 1 No. 3, Summer 2006. Retrieved July 22,
2006.

5.^ Birth certificate and "Dalí Biography". Dalí Museum. Dalí Museum.
http://www.salvadordalimuseum.org/history/biography.html. Retrieved
2008-08-24.

6.^ Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, 1948, London: Vision Press,
p.33

7.^ a b c d e f Llongueras, Lluís. (2004) Dalí, Ediciones B – Mexico. ISBN

84-666-1343-9.

8.^ a b Rojas, Carlos. Salvador Dalí, Or the Art of Spitting on Your

Mother's Portrait, Penn State Press (1993). ISBN 0-271-00842-3.

9.^ Salvador Dalí. SINA.com. Retrieved on July 31, 2006.

10.^ Salvador Dalí biography on astrodatabank.com. Retrieved September

30, 2006.
11.^ a b Dalí, Secret Life, p.2

12.^ "Dalí Biography 1904–1989 – Part Two". artelino.com.

http://www.artelino.com/articles/dali.asp. Retrieved 2006-09-30.

13.^ Dalí, Secret Life, pp.152–153

14.^ As listed in his prison record of 1924, aged 20. However, his
hairdresser and biographer, Luis Llongueras, states Dalí was 1.74 m (5 ft
8 1⁄2 in) tall.

15.^ For more in-depth information about the Lorca-Dalí connection see
Lorca-Dalí: el amor que no pudo ser and The Shameful Life of Salvador
Dalí, both by Ian Gibson.

16.^ a b Bosquet, Alain, Conversations with Dalí, 1969. p. 19–20. (PDF

format) (of Garcia Lorca) 'S.D.:He was homosexual, as everyone knows,
and madly in love with me. He tried to screw me twice .... I was extremely
annoyed, because I wasn’t homosexual, and I wasn’t interested in giving
in. Besides, it hurts. So nothing came of it. But I felt awfully flattered vis-
à-vis the prestige. Deep down I felt that he was a great poet and that I
owe him a tiny bit of the Divine Dalí's asshole. He eventually bagged a
young girl, and she replaced me in the sacrifice. Failing to get me to put
my ass at his disposal, he swore that the girl’s sacrifice was matched by
his own: it was the first time he had ever slept with a woman.'

17.^ a b c Salvador Dalí: Olga's Gallery. Retrieved on July 22, 2006.

18.^ "Paintings Gallery #5". Dali-gallery.com. http://www.dali-

gallery.com/html/galleries/painting05.htm. Retrieved 2010-08-22.

19.^ Hodge, Nicola, and Libby Anson. The A–Z of Art: The World's
Greatest and Most Popular Artists and Their Works. California: Thunder
Bay Press, 1996. Online citation.

20.^ "Phelan, Joseph". Artcyclopedia.com.

http://www.artcyclopedia.com/feature-2005-03.html. Retrieved 2010-08-
22.
21.^ Koller, Michael. Un Chien Andalou. senses of cinema January 2001.
Retrieved on July 26, 2006.

22.^ a b c Shelley, Landry. "Dalí Wows Crowd in Philadelphia". Unbound

(The College of New Jersey) Spring 2005. Retrieved on July 22, 2006.

23.^ Gibson, Ian (1997). The shameful life of Salvador Dalí. London:
Faber and Faber. pp. 238–9. ISBN 0-571-19380-3.

24.^ Clocking in with Salvador Dalí: Salvador Dalí's Melting Watches

(PDF) from the Salvador Dalí Museum. Retrieved on August 19, 2006.

25.^ a b Salvador Dalí, La Conquête de l’irrationnel (Paris: Éditions

surréalistes, 1935), p. 25.

26.^ Current Biography 1940, pp219–220

27.^ Luis Buñuel, My Last Sigh: The Autobiography of Luis Buñuel,

Vintage 1984. ISBN 0816643873

28.^ Greeley, Robin Adèle (2006). Surrealism and the Spanish Civil War,
Yale University Press. p. 81. ISBN 0-300-11295-5.

29.^ Jackaman, Rob. (1989) The Course of English Surrealist Poetry Since
the 1930s, Edwin Mellen Press. ISBN 0-88946-932-6.

30.^ Current Biography 1940, p219

31.^ "Program Notes by Andy Ditzler (2005) and Deborah Solomon,

',Utopia Parkway:The Life of Joseph Cornell (New York: Farrar, Straus, and
Giroux, 2003)". Andel.home.mindspring.com.
http://andel.home.mindspring.com/cornell_notes.htm. Retrieved 2010-08-
22.

32.^ Salvador Dalí Exhibition, Exhibition Catalogue – February 16 through

May 15, 2005

33.^ http://philadelphia.about.com/od/salvador_dali/a/salvador_dali_a.htm
34.^ Bretell, Richard R. (1995). Impressionist paintings, drawings, and
sculpture from the Wendy and Emery Reeves Collection. Dallas Museum of
Art. ISBN 9780936227153.

35.^ a b Artcyclopedia: Salvador Dalí. Retrieved September 4, 2006.

36.^ a b Descharnes, Robert and Nicolas. Salvador Dalí. New York:

Konecky & Konecky, 1993. p. 35.

37.^ Luis Buñuel, My Last Sigh: The Autobiography of Luis Buñuel

(Vintage, 1984) ISBN 0816643873

38.^ a b c Dalí's gift to exorcist uncovered Catholic News October 14,

2005

39.^ a b c Navarro, Vicente, PhD "The Jackboot of Dada: Salvador Dalí,

Fascist". Counterpunch. December 6, 2003. Retrieved July 22, 2006.

40.^ López, Ignacio Javier. The Old Age of William Tell (A study of
Buñuel's Tristana). MLN 116 (2001): 295–314.

41.^ The Phantasmagoric Universe—Espace Dalí À Montmartre. Bonjour

Paris. Retrieved on August 22, 2006.

42.^ The History and Development of Holography. Holophile. Retrieved on

August 22, 2006.

43.^ Hello, Dalí. Carnegie Magazine. Retrieved on August 22, 2006.

44.^ Elliott H. King in Dawn Ades (ed.), Dalí, Bompiani Arte, Milan, 2004,
p. 456.

45.^ Salvador Dalí Bio, Art on 5th. Retrieved July 22, 2006. Archived May
4, 2006 at the Wayback Machine.

46.^ Salvador Dalí at Le Meurice Paris and St Regis in New York Andreas
Augustin, ehotelier.com, 2007
47.^ "Scotsman review of Dirty Dalí". The Scotsman. UK.
http://living.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=869862007. Retrieved 2010-08-
22.

48.^ The Dali I knew By Brian Sewell, thisislondon.co.uk

49.^ Ian Gibson (1997). The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí. W. W. Norton
& Company.

50.^ a b Excerpts from the BOE – Website Heráldica y Genealogía

Hispana

51.^ Dalí as "Marqués de Dalí de Púbol" – Boletín Oficial del Estado, the
official gazette of the Spanish government

52.^ "Dalí Resting at Castle After Injury in Fire". The New York Times.
September 1, 1984. Retrieved July 22, 2006.

53.^ Mark Rogerson (1989). The Dalí Scandal: An Investigation. Victor

Gollancz. ISBN 0575037865.

54.^ Etherington -Smith, Meredith The Persistence of Memory: A

Biography of Dalí p. 411, 1995 Da Capo Press, ISBN 0306806622

55.^ Etherington -Smith, Meredith The Persistence of Memory: A

Biography of Dalí pp. xxiv, 411–412, 1995 Da Capo Press, ISBN
0306806622

56.^ http://www.salvador-dali.org/en_index.html | The Gala-Salvador Dal í

Foundation website

57.^ http://arsny.com/requested.html | Most frequently requested artists list

of the Artists Rights Society

58.^ Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (New York: Dial
Press, 1942), p. 317.

59.^ Michael Taylor in Dawn Ades (ed.), Dalí (Milan: Bompiani, 2004), p.
342
60.^ a b Dalí Universe Collection. County Hall Gallery. Retrieved on July
28, 2006.

61.^ a b "Salvador Dalí's symbolism". County Hall Gallery. Retrieved on

July 28, 2006

62.^ a b Lobster telephone. National Gallery of Australia. Retrieved on

August 4, 2006.

63.^ Tate Collection | Lobster Telephone by Salvador Dalí. Tate Online.

Retrieved on August 4, 2006.

64.^ Federico García Lorca. Pegásos. Retrieved on August 8, 2006.

65.^ a b c Dalí Rotterdam Museum Boijmans. Paris Contemporary

Designs. Retrieved on August 8, 2006.

66.^ Past Exhibitions. Haggerty Museum of Art. Retrieved August 8, 2006.

67.^ "Dali & Film" Edt. Gale, Matthew. Salvador Dalí Museum Inc. St
Petersburg, Florida. 2007.

68.^ "L'Âge d'Or (The Golden Age)" Harvard Film Archive. 2006. April 10,
2008.

69.^ Short, Robert. "The Age of Gold: Surrealist Cinema, Persistence of

Vision" Vol. 3, 2002.

70.^ Elliott H. King, Dalí, Surrealism and Cinema, Kamera Books 2007, p.
169.

71.^ a b Dalí: Explorations into the domain of science. The Triangle

Online. Retrieved August 8, 2006.

72.^ [Anon.] (1976). "Faenza-Goldmedaille für SUOMI". Artis 29: 8. ISSN

0004-3842.

73.^ a b c Prose, Francine. (2000) The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women
and the Artists they Inspired. Harper Perennial. ISBN 0-06-055525-4.
74.^ Lear, Amanda. (1986) My Life with Dalí. Beaufort Books. ISBN
0825303737.

75.^ Lozano, Carlos. (2000) Sex, Surrealism, Dalí, and Me. Razor Books
Ltd. ISBN 0953820505.

76.^ Etherington-Smith, Meredith. (1995) The Persistence of Memory: A

Biography of Dalí. Da Capo Press. ISBN 0306806622.

77.^ Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali, by George Orwell

78.^ "Payne, Stanley G. THE A History of Spain and Portugal, Vol. 2, Ch.
26, p. 648–651 (Print Edition: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973)
(LIBRARY OF IBERIAN RESOURCES ONLINE Accessed May 15, 2007)".
Libro.uca.edu. http://libro.uca.edu/payne2/payne26.htm. Retrieved 2010-
08-22.

79.^ De la Cueva, Julio Religious Persecution, Anticlerical Tradition and

Revolution: On Atrocities against the Clergy during the Spanish Civil War,
Journal of Contemporary History Vol XXXIII – 3, 1998

80.^ Salvador Dalí pictured with Francisco Franco[dead link]

81.^ The Surreal World of Salvador Dalí. Smithsonian Magazine. 2005.

Retrieved August 31, 2006.

82.^ "The Salvador Dalí Online Exhibit". MicroVision.

http://www.daliweb.tampa.fl.us/collection.htm. Retrieved 2006-06-13.

83.^ a b "Dalí picture sprung from jail". BBC. 2003-03-02.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/2812683.stm.

[edit] References

•Linde Sabler. "Dalí". London: Haus Publishing, 2004 (paperback, ISBN

978-1-904341-75-8).

•Salvador Dali interviewed by Mike Wallace on The Mike Wallace Interview

April 19, 1985
[edit] External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Salvador Dalí

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Salvador Dalí

Biographies and news

•Dalí's surreal wind-powered organ lacks only a rhinoceros

•UbuWeb: Salvador Dalí—Interview and bank advertisement.

•Salvador Dalí in the INA Archives – A collection of interviews and footage

of Dalí in the French television

•The Master Visualizer

Other links

•Salvador Dalí at the Museum of Modern Art

•Article on Dalí's religious faith

•The Salvador Dalí photo library 60.000 photos

•Article on Dalí's opera poem Être Dieu: opéra-poème, audiovisuel et

cathare en six parties (Being God: a Cathar Audiovisual Opera-Poem in
Six Parts)

•Watch Un Chien Andalou at LikeTelevision

•Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation English language site

•St. Petersburg Dalí Museum

•Kurutz, Steven, "Hello, Dali: Surrealist Museum Becomes a Reality", The

Wall Street Journal Speakeasy blog, January 11, 2011, 4:46 pm ET.
Interview with St. Petersburg (FL) museum director Dr. Hank Hine about
new building.
•"The shameful life of Salvador Dalí" (the witches of Llers)".

•Dalí and Fages: "that intelligent and most cordial of collaborations"

Exhibitions

•Espace Dalí—The unique permanent exhibition in France (Museum & Dalí

Fine Art Galleries)

•Dalí & Film – Tate Modern, London

•Museum-Gallery Xpo: Salvador Dalí, Marquis de Púbol in Bruges

•Museum of Modern Art

•Union List of Artist Names, Getty Vocabularies. ULAN Full Record Display
for Salvador Dalí. Getty Vocabulary Program, Getty Research Institute. Los
Angeles, California.

Authority control: LCCN: n79021554 | VIAF: 64004109

v · d · eSalvador Dalí

List of works

Selected

paintings Landscape Near Figueras (1910) • Vilabertran (1913) • Fiesta in

Figueres (1914–16) • Port of Cadaqués (Night) (1918–19) • The Artist's
Father at Llane Beach (1920) • The Garden of Llaner (Cadaqués) (1920–
21) • Cabaret Scene (1922) • Cubist Self-Portrait with "La Publicitat"
(1923) • Self-portrait with L'Humanitie (1923) • Portrait of Luis Buñuel
(1924) • Siphon and Small Bottle of Rum (1924) • The Basket of Bread
(1926) • Honey Is Sweeter Than Blood (1927) • The Lugubrious Game
(1929) • The First Days of Spring (1929) • The Great Masturbator (1929) •
The Persistence of Memory (1931) • The Ghost of Vermeer of Delft Which
Can Be Used As a Table (1934) • Morphological Echo (1934–36) •
Archaeological Reminiscence of Millet's Angelus (1935) • Autumn
Cannibalism (1936) • Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of
Civil War) (1936) • The Burning Giraffe (1937) • Metamorphosis of
Narcissus (1937) • Swans Reflecting Elephants (1937) • Apparition of Face
and Fruit Dish on a Beach (1938) • The Sublime Moment (1938) • Shirley
Temple, The Youngest, Most Sacred Monster of the Cinema in Her Time
(1939) • The Face of War (1940) • Slave Market with the Disappearing
Bust of Voltaire (1940) • Honey is Sweeter than Blood (1941) •
Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man (1943) • Dream
Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before
Awakening (1944) • Galarina (1944–45) • Basket of Bread (1945) • The
Temptation of St. Anthony (1946) • The Elephants (1948) • Leda Atomica
(1949) • The Madonna of Port Lligat (1949) • Christ of Saint John of the
Cross (1951) • Galatea of the Spheres (1952) • The Disintegration of the
Persistence of Memory (1952–54) • Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus)
(1954) • Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by the Horns of Her Own Chastity
(1954) • The Sacrament of the Last Supper (1955) • Living Still Life (1956)
• The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus (1958–59) • The
Ecumenical Council (1959–60) • Galacidalacidesoxyribonucleicacid (1963)
• Tuna Fishing (1966–67) • The Hallucinogenic Toreador (1968–70) • La
Toile Daligram (1972) • The Swallow's Tail (1983)

Other works Writings: Un Chien Andalou (1929) • L'Age d'Or (1930) •

Giraffes on Horseback Salad (1937) • Libretto for Bacchanale (1939) • The
Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (1942, autobiography)

Films: Un Chien Andalou (1929) • L'Age d'Or (1930) • Spellbound (1945,

dream sequence) • Impressions of Upper Mongolia (1975, narration)

Animated films: Destino (1946, completed 2003)

Logos: Chupa Chups

Opera: Être Dieu (1985)

Sculpture: Lobster Telephone (1936) • Mae West Lips Sofa (1937)

Costumes: costumes for García Lorca's play Mariana Pineda (1927)

Novels: Hidden Faces (1944)

Related articles Castle of Púbol • Dalí Universe • Espace Dalí • Dalí

Theatre and Museum • Salvador Dalí Museum • Salvador Dalí (film) • Little
Ashes • Gala Dalí • Paranoiac-critical method

Persondata

Name Dalí, Salvador

Alternative names Dalí, Salvador Felip Jacint, Domènech; Dalí, Salvador

Felipe Jacinto, Domènech

Short description 20th century Catalan surrealist artist

Date of birth May 11, 1904

Place of birth Figueres, Catalonia, Spain

Date of death January 23, 1989

Place of death Figueres, Catalonia, Spain

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Dal%C3%AD"

Categories: Salvador Dalí | 1904 births | 1989 deaths | Catalan artists |

Catalan painters | Exorcism | Légion d'honneur recipients | Marquesses of
Spain | Modern artists | Modern painters | People from Alt Empordà |
People with Parkinson's disease | Spanish sculptors | Spanish people |
Spanish painters | Spanish printmakers | Spanish Roman Catholics |
Surrealist artists | 20th-century painters

•This page was last modified on 17 July 2011 at 22:45.

Web www.all-art.org

Art of the 20th Century

Salvador Dali

If You Act the Genius, You Will Be One! 1910-1928

The Proof of Love 1929-1935

The Conguest of the Irrational 1936-1939

The Triumph of Avida Dollars 1939-1946

The Mystical Manifesto 1946-1962

Paths to Immortality 1962-1989

illustrations:

Biblia Sacrata, Marquis de Sade, Faust, The Art of Love,

Don Quixote, Divine Comedy, Decameron,

Casanova, Les Caprices de Goya

Paths to Immortality

1962-1989

I'm not the clown!" cried Dali in his own defence. "But in its naivety this
monstrously cynical society does not see who is simply putting on a serious
act the better to hide his madness. I cannot say it often enough: I am not
mad. My clear-sightedness has acquired such sharpness and
concentration that, in the whole of the century, there has been no more
heroic or more astounding personality than me, and apart from Nietzsche
(who finished by going mad, though) my equal will not be found in other
centuries either. My painting proves it."

In point of fact, Dali observed the gradual decline of modern art with
contempt. As it slid into nothingness, he laughed to see what Duchamp's
ready-mades in Dada and Surrealist days had led to. He was amused to
see the urinal Duchamp had exhibited in New York in 1911 as a sculpture
titled Fontaine. "The first person to compare the cheeks of a young woman
with a rose was plainly a poet. The second, who repeated the comparison,
was probably an idiot. All the theories of Dadaism and Surrealism are
being monotonously repeated: their soft contours have prompted countless
soft objects. The globe is being smothered in ready-mades. The fifteen-
metre loaf of bread is now fifteen kilometres long... People have already
forgotten that the founder of Dadaism, Tristan Tzara, stated in his
manifesto in the very infancy of the movements: 'Dada is this. Dada is
that... Either way, it's crap.' This kind of more or less black humour is
foreign to the new generation. They are genuinely convinced that their
neo-Dadaism is subtler than the art of Praxiteles."

Dali painting "The Medusa of Sleep" on Gala's forehead

Dali recalled: "During the last war, between Arcachon and Bordeaux,
Marcel Duchamp and I talked about the newly awoken interest in
preparations using excrement; tiny secretions taken from the navel were
considered 'luxury editions'. I replied that I would have liked to have a
navel secretion of Raphael. Now a well-known Pop artist is selling artists'
excrement in Verona, in extremely stylish flacons, as a luxury item. When
Duchamp realised that he had scattered the ideas of his youth to the
winds, until he himself was left with none, he most aristocratically declined
to play the game, and prophetically announced that other young men were
specializing in the chess match of contemporary art; and then he began to
play chess..."

And Dali observed: "At the time there were just seventeen people in Paris
who understood the ready-mades - the very few ready-mades by Marcel
Duchamp. Nowadays there are seventeen million who understand them.
When the day comes that every object that exists is a ready-made, there
will no longer be any ready-mades at all. When that day comes, originality
will consist in creating a "work of art out of sheer urgent compulsion. The
moral attitude of the ready-made consists in avoiding contact with reality.
Ready-mades have subconsciously influenced the photo-realists, leading
them to paint ready-mades by hand. There can be no doubt that if
Vermeer van Delft or Gerard Dou had been alive in 1973, they would have
had no objection to painting the interior of a car or the outside of a
telephone box..."

Medusa's Head

1962

The Alchemist

1962

Galacidalacidesoxyribonucleicacid

1963

Dali declared: "It is quite correct that I have made use of photography
throughout my life. I stated years ago that painting is merely photography
done by hand, consisting of super-fine images the sole significance of
which resides in the fact that they were seen by a human eye and
recorded by a human hand. Every great work of art that I admire was
copied from a photograph. The inventor of the magnifying glass was born
in the same year as Vermeer. Not enough attention has yet been paid to
this fact. And I am convinced that Vermeer von Delft used a mirror to view
his subjects and make tracings of them. Praxiteles, most divine of all
sculptors, copied his bodies faithfully, without the slightest departure.
Velazquez had a similar respect for reality, with complete chastity..." And:
"The hand of a painter must be so faithful that it is capable of automatically
correcting constituents of Nature that have been distorted by a photograph.
Every painter must have an ultra-academic training. It is only through
virtuosity of such an order that the possibility of something else becomes
available: Art."

Dali prophetically added: "I foresee that the new art will be what I term
'quantum realism'. It will take into account what the physicists call quantum
energy, what mathematics calls chance, and what the artists call the
imponderable: Beauty. The picture of tomorrow will be a faithful image of
reality, but one will sense that it is a reality pervaded with extraordinary life,
corresponding to what is known as the discontinuity of matter. Velazquez
and Vermeer were divisionists. They already intuited the fears of modern
Man. Nowadays, the most talented and sensitive painters merely express
the fear of indeterminism. Modern science says that nothing really exists,
and one sees scientists passionately debating photographic plates on which
there is demonstrably nothing of a material nature. So artists who paint
their pictures out of nothing are not so far wrong. Still, it is only a
transitional phase. The great artist must be capable of assimilating
nothingness into his painting. And that nothingness will breathe life into the
art of tomorrow."

Hercules Lifts the Skin of the Sea and Stops Venus for an Instant from
Waking Love

1963
 On 15 October 1962, Dali exhibited The Battle of Tetuan in the Palacio
del Tinell in Barcelona, alongside the picture by Mariano Fortuny that had
inspired it. To Dali's way of thinking, it was the start of a war of pictures. In
his own work, as in Fortuny's, virtuosity was a function of carefully
quantified patchwork and dabs, from which substance the images emerged
suddenly. Dali illuminatingly commented that when he considered the
patterning of print on a newspaper, what he saw was The Battle of Tetuan.
Or soccer games. In the Diary of a Genius he wrote (3 September 1963):

"I have always been in the habit of looking at papers upside down. Instead
of reading the news, I look at it and I see it. Even as an adolescent, I saw,
among the typographical spirals, and just by squinting, soccer games as
they would look on television. It even happened that before half time, I had
to go and rest, so exhausted was I by the ups and downs of the game.
Today, holding the papers upside down, I see divine things moving at such
a pace that I decide, in a sublime inspiration of Dalinian pop art, to have
pieces of newspapers repainted which contain aesthetic treasures that are
often worthy of Phidias.

I shall have these newspapers, in outsize enlargements, quantified by fly

droppings... This idea occurs to me when I notice the beauty of certain
newspaper collages, yellowed and a bit flyspecked, by Pablo Picasso and
Georges Braque.

This evening, while I am writing, I am listening to the radio, which is

resounding with the boom of guns that are deservedly being fired for
Braque's funeral. Braque - who is famous among other things for his
aesthetic discovery of news-paper collages. And I dedicate in homage to
him my most transcendent and much more instantaneously famous bust of
Socrates quantified by flies."
The Battle of Tetuan

1961-62

Arabs. Study for "The Battle of Tetuan"

1960-61

electrocular Monocle and the Paranoiac-Critical Method

Dali took a lively interest in every kind of scientific development, and in

spring 1962 he returned from America with an "electrocular monocle". This
astounding gadget had been developed by the electronics section of a
major aeronautics company. A recorder registered images and transferred
them televisually to a telescopic tube that substituted for a screen, a
telescope so constructed that the eye could distinguish the televised image
yet at the same time see everything in its field of vision in a perfectly
normal way. For Dali, the painter needed a second type of vision,
occasioned by irritation of the retina. This double vision, which others were
prompting with the help of mescahn, hallucinogenic mushrooms or LSD,
could be caused by the "electrocular monocle" instead. In conversations
with a professor named Jayle, a leading optics specialist, over the course
of several years, Dali had been expressing the wish to have a kind of
contact lens filled with fluid introduced into the eye - so that images
controlled from outside could even be registered during sleep.

Mohammed's Dream (Homage to Fortuny)

1961

Arab

1962
 Dali was so excited by the "electrocular monocle" that he immediately had
one installed in the Catalan beret he frequently wore. Dali - it is worth
mentioning -never wore a hat proper, but nonetheless liked to cover his
head with the most curious of headgear: for him, anything that touched his
hair possessed symbolic meaning. In his youth he had shaved his head for
the sake of doing so - to balance a sea urchin. He was once even
observed scooping out the soft inside of a crouston loaf, which resembles a
tricorn hat in shape, and entering the most exclusive club in Figueras, the
"Sport Figuerenc", wearing his impromptu hat — causing a scandal
amongst the members. Later in London he made a public appearance
wearing a diving suit, and posed for photographer Cecil Beaton in a
fencer's mask.

If we are to grasp Dali's art correctly, we need to see how capable he was
of reigning in his imagination and his dreams, in order to suit them to the
subjects of his paintings. His "paranoiac-critical" activity could be visited on
random materials suddenly and unexpectedly. For example, at a time when
Fortuny's The Battle of Tetuan had become an obsession with Dali, he
happened upon a major component of the picture he himself planned to
paint on the same subject - in the American news magazine Time. One
winter evening in New York he discovered, in a trodden and crumpled copy
he found in the snow, a photograph of a fantastic Arabian scene, and,
quickly picking it up, declared: "I have found my battle of Tetuan." His
imagination was always rapid, as this anecdote concerning a newspaper
photograph reminds us.

Arabs - the Death of Raimundus Lullus

1963

udy for Deoxyribonucleic Acid Arabs

1963
 As a whole, Dali' s work as a painter was governed by a quest ruled by
the need to discipline his inspiration and technique. In 1948, at a time
when he was working on Leda Atomica, he began to take an active interest
in the Divine Proportions laid down in the 15th century by Fra Luca Pacioli.
With the assistance of Prince Matila Ghyka, a Romanian mathematician,
Dali spent almost three months calculating the mathematical disposition of
Leda Atomica. In all his works to follow, his procedure was the same; he
used the golden section, the canon, and the principles of divine proportion.
Not long after, in the Nova Geometria of Raimundus Lullus, he discovered
arguably the most perfect square in aesthetics, known as the Figura
Magistralis. Lullus's treatise was taken by the architect of El Escorial, Juan
de Herrera, as his guide when he composed his discourse on cubic form;
and Dali drew upon this work in the composition of paintings such as
Corpus Hypercubus, now in New York's Metropolitan Museum. As with
most great artists, it was in fact an innate sixth sense for proportion that
enabled Dali to run the gamut of the aesthetic range. He was able to
endow the rules with life as he desired, whether they derived from antiquity,
the Middle Ages or the Renaissance. Every good painter, Dali said, should
proceed as Velazquez did: using his sense of proportion and obeying every
rule in the book to the letter in the first version of a painting - and then
smashing up the lot, and indeed standing several of the rules on their
heads.

Macrophotographic Self-Portrait with

the Appearance of Gala

1962

custom in Spain is for a woman to place her maiden name before her
married name and to associate the former with the latter through a
possessive "of", to emphasize that the woman belongs to that particular
man. The title of a book by Robert Descharnes, Dalide Gala, thus
inevitably suggests that Dali belonged to Gala - and is quite correct to do
so. It was Gala who inspired Dali, Gala who kept him under control, Gala
who saw to the practicalities of their life together. In the Secret Life, Dali
confirmed that he would have been nothing without Gala. It is useful to
read Descharnes' book if we are to understand his work, and to see that
Gala was not only his wife but also adopted the roles of his mother and
sister. Psychiatrist Pierre Roumeguere wrote a study of Dali's personality
which nicely complements Dali's own mythology of Gala. In it, Dali is cast
as Pollux, while his dead brother is Castor and Gala Helen. That is to say,
after having been Leda's mother, Gala became the immortal sister of
Pollux, and Leda's daughter. Roumeguere's theory changes the contours of
the Port Lligat house: suddenly we have to accommodate an extra oval,
the egg in which Gala and Dali were united, in our ideas.

Fifty Abstract Paintings Which as Seen from Two Yards Change into

Three Lenins Masquerading as Chinese and as Seen from Six Yards

Appear as the Head of a Royal Bengal Tiger

1963

from now on, Dali lived with two idees fixes: that of the Dioscuri, and that
of cybernetic science. His mind was busy looking for correlations between
the two areas. One of the preliminary sketches for The Battle of Tetuan
bears the dedication, "For Helen from her Dioscuri". Dali was excited to
discover that the word "cybernetic" was etymologically derived from the
Greek "kybernetes", a steersman or pilot. For Plato, the pilot's task was
clear. The captain chose a harbour into which the craft was to be sailed.
The helmsman adjusted the rudder in order to steer the vessel in the
required direction. And the pilot ensured that the helmsman was continually
aware how to use his rudder in order to reach the harbour. In this joint
effort, the captain took the decision on a goal, the helmsman steered, and
the pilot gave guidance. The pilot, in other words, is cybernetic in terms of
his activity; and this derivation and meaning of the word struck Dali
powerfully, since he saw himself as the pilot of his own life. But he went a
step further and found a way of associating this with his other current
obsession, with the Dioscuri. Was it not the task of Castor and Pollux, in
antiquity, to guide ships ? Having made this connection, Dali averred that,
with the remote guidance of the Dioscuri, he was piloting the boat of their
life, with Gala's hand firmly on the rudder.

venus with Drawers

1964

venus' Otorhinologic Head

1964

The Sacred Heart of Jesus

1962

St. George and the Dragon

1962

Twist in the Studio of Velazquez

1962

Vision of Fatima

1962

Madonna with a Mystical Rose

1963

Untitled (Still Life with Lilies)

1963

The Judgement of Paris

1963

Portrait of My Dead Brother

1963

Landscape with Flies

1964

Untitled (St. John)

1964

The Sun of Dali

1965

Female Nude (after restoration)

1964

Bust of Dante

1964

Modern Rhapsody" from the 1957 series "The Seven Arts"

THE CONQUEST OF

THE IRRATIONAL

"The Conquest of the Irrational" of 1935, one of several manifestos Dali

wrote, is reprinted here as translated from the French by Joachim
Neugroschel.

The images shown on this page are not intended

to match the context.

THE WATERS WE SWIM IN

We all know that the brilliant and sensational progress of the individual
sciences, the glory and honour of the “space” and the era we live in,
involves, on the one hand, the crisis and the overwhelming disrepute of
“logical intuition”, and on the other hand, the respect for irrational factors
and hierarchies as new positive and specifically productive values.

We must bear in mind that pure and logical intuition, pure intuition, I repeat,
a pure maid of all work, in the private homes of the particular sciences, had
been carrying about in her womb an illegitimate child who was nothing less
than the child of physics proper; and by the time Maxwell and Faraday
were at work, this son was noticeably weighed down with an unequivocal
persuasiveness and a personal force of gravity that left no doubt about the
father of the child: Newton.

Because of this downward pull and the force of gravity, pure intuition, after
being booted out of the homes of all the particular sciences, has now
turned into pure prostitution, for we see her offering her final charms and
final turbulences in the brothel of the artistic and literary world.

It is under cultural circumstances like these that our contemporaries,

systematically cretinised by the mechanism and architecture of self-
punishment, by the psychological congratulations of bureaucracy, by
ideological chaos, and the austerity of imagination, by paternal wastelands
of emotion, and other wastelands, waste their energy biting into the senile
and triumphal tastiness of the plump, atavitic, tender, military, and territorial
back of some Hitlerian nursemaid, in order to finally manage to
communicate in some fashion or other with the consecrated totemic host
which has been whisked away from under their very noses and which, we
all know, was nothing but the spiritual and symbolical sustenance that
Catholicism has been offering for centuries to appease the cannibalistic
frenzy of moral and irrational starvation.

For, in point of fact, the contemporary hunger for the irrational is always
keenest before a cultural dining table offering only the cold and
unsubstantial leftovers of art and literature and the burning analytical
preciseness of the particular sciences, momentarily incapable of any
nutritive synthesis because of their disproportionate scope and
specialisation, and in all events totally unassimilable except by speculative
cannibalism.

Here lies the source of the enormous nutritive and cultural responsibility of
surrealism, a responsibility that has been growing more and more objective,
encroaching, and exclusivist with each new cataclysm of collective famine,
each new gluttonous, viscous, ignominious and sublime bite of the fearful
jaws of the masses wolfing down the congested, bloody, and preeminently
biological cutlet of politics.

It is under these circumstances that Salvador Dali, clutching the precise

apparatus of paranoid-critical activity, and less willing than ever to desert
his uncompromising cultural post, has for a long time now been suggesting
that we might do well to eat up the surrealities, too; for we surrealists are
the sort of high-quality, decadent, stimulating, immoderate and ambivalent
foodstuff which, with the utmost tact and intelligence, agrees with the gamy,
paradoxical and succulently truculent state proper to, and characteristic of,
the climate of moral and ideological confusion in which we have the honour
and the pleasure to be living.
For we surrealists, as you will realise by paying us some slight attention,
are not quite artists, nor are we really scientists; we are caviar, and believe
me, caviar is the extravagance and the very intelligence of taste, especially
in concrete times like the present in which the above mentioned hungering
for the irrational, albeit an incommensurable, impatient, and imperialist
hungering, is so exasperated by the salivary expectations of waiting, that in
order to arrive progressively at its glorious conquests close by, it must first
swallow the fine, heady, and dialectical grape of caviar, without which the
heavy and stifling food of the next ideologies would threaten immediately to
paralyse the vital and philosophical rage of the belly of history.

For caviar is the life experience not only of the sturgeon, but of the
surrealists as well, because, like the sturgeon, we are carnivorous fish,
who, as I have already hinted, swim between two bodies of water, the cold
water of art and the warm water of science; and it is precisely due to that
temperature and to our swimming against the current that the experience of
our lives and our fecundation reaches that turbid depth, that irrational and
moral hyperlucidity possible only in the climate of Neronian osmosis that
results from the living and continuous fusion of the sole’s thickness and its
crowned heat, the satisfaction and the circumcision of the sole and the
corrugated iron, territorial ambition and agricultural patience, keen
collectivism and visors propped up by letters of white on the old billiard
cushions and letters of white on the old millyard Russians, all sorts of warm
and dermatological elements, which, in short, are the coexisting and
characteristic elements presiding over the notion of the “imponderable”, a
sham notion unanimously recognised as functioning as an epithet for the
elusive taste of caviar and hiding the timid and gustatory germs of concrete
irrationality, which, being merely the apotheosis and the paroxysm of the
objective imponderable, constitutes the divisionist exactness and precision
of the very caviar of imagination and will constitute, exclusively and
philosophically, the terribly demoralising and terribly complicated result of
my experiences and inventions in painting.

For one thing is certain: I hate any form of simplicity whatsoever.

MY FORTIFICATIONS

It seems perfectly transparent to me that my enemies, my friends and the

general public allegedly do not understand the meaning of the images that
arise and that I transcribe into my paintings. How can anyone expect them
to understand when I myself, the “maker”, don’t understand my paintings
either.

The fact that I myself, at the moment of painting, do not understand their
meaning doesn’t imply that these paintings are meaningless: on the
contrary, their meaning is so deep, complex, coherent and involuntary that
it eludes the simple analysis of logical intuition.

In order to reduce my paintings to the level of the vernacular and explain

them, I should have to submit them to special analyses, preferably of a
scientific rigor and as ambitiously objective as possible. After all, any
explanation occurs a posteriori, once the painting exists as a phenomenon.

My sole pictorial ambition is to materialise by means of the most

imperialist rage of precision the images of concrete irrationality. The world
of imagination and the world of concrete irrationality may be as objectively
evident,

consistent, durable, as persuasively, cognoscitively and communicably thick

as the exterior world of phenomenal reality. The important thing, however,
is that which one wishes to communicate: the irrational concrete subject.

The pictorial means of expression are concentrated on the subject. The

illusionism of the most abjectly arriviste and irresistible mimetic art, the
clever tricks of a paralysing foreshortening, the most analytically narrative
and discredited academicism, can become sublime hierarchies of thought
when combined with new exactness of concrete irrationality as the images
of concrete irrationality approach the phenomenal Real, the corresponding
means of expression approach those of great realist painting — Velasquez
and Vermeer de Delft — to paint realistically in accordance with irrational
thinking and the unknown imagination. Instantaneous photography, in
colour and done by hand, of superfine, extravagant, extra-plastic, extra-
pictorial, unexplored, deceiving, hypernormal, feeble images of concrete
irrationality — images momentarily unexplainable and irreducible either by
systems of logical intuition or by rational mechanisms.

The images of concrete irrationality are thus authentically unknown images.

Surrealism, in its first period, offers specific methods for approaching the
images of concrete irrationality. These methods, based on the exclusively
passive and receptive role of the surrealist subject, are being liquidated to
make way for new surrealist methods of the systematic exploration of the
irrational. The pure psychic automatism, dreams, experimental oneirism,
surrealist objects with symbolic functioning, the ideography of instincts,
phosphenomenal and hypnagogical irritation, etc, now occur per se as
nonevolutive processes.
Furthermore, the images obtained offer two serious inconveniences:

(1) they cease being unknown images, because by falling into the realm of
psychoanalysis they are easily reduced to current and logical speech albeit
continuing to offer an uninterpretable residue and a very vast and authentic
margin of enigma, especially for the greater public;

(2) their essentially virtual and chimerical character no longer satisfies our
desires or our “principles of verification” first announced by Breton in his
Discourse on the Smidgen of Reality.

Ever since, the frenzied images of surrealism desperately tend toward their
tangible possibility, their objective and physical existence in reality. Only
those people who are unaware of this can still flounder about in the gross
misunderstanding of the “poetic escape”, and continue to believe our
mysticism of the fantastic and our fanaticism of the marvellous.

I, for my part, believe that the era of inaccessible mutilations, unrealisable

bloodthirsty osmoses, flying visceral lacerations, hair-rocks, catastrophic
uprootings, is over as far as experimentation goes, although this era may
quite probably continue to constitute the exclusive iconography of a large
period of surrounding surrealist painting.

The new frenzied images of concrete irrationality tend toward their real and
physical “possibility”; they go beyond the domain of psychoanalysable
“virtual” hallucinations and manifestations.
These images present the evolutive and productive character characteristic
of the systematic fact. Eluard’s and Breton’s attempts at simulation,
Breton’s recent object-poems, René Magritte’s latest pictures, the
“method” of Picasso’s latest sculptures, the theoretical and pictorial activity
of Salvador Dali, etc .... prove the need of concrete materialisation in
current reality, the moral and systematic condition to assert, objectively and
on the level of the Real, the frenzied unknown world of our rational
experiences.

Contrary to dream memory, and the virtual and impossible images of purely
receptive states, “which one can only narrate”, it is the physical facts of
“objective” irrationality with which one can really hurt oneself.

It was in 1929 that Salvador Dali turned his attention to the internal
mechanism of paranoid phenomena, envisaging the possibility of an
experimental method based on the power that dominates the systematic
associations peculiar to paranoia; subsequently this method was to become
the frenzied-critical synthesis that bears the name of “paranoid-critical
activity”.

Paranoia: delirium of interpretative association involving a systematic

structure — paranoid-critical activity: spontaneous method of irrational
knowledge based on the interpretative-critical association of delirium
phenomena.

The presence of active and systematic elements peculiar to paranoia

warrant the evolutive and productive character proper to paranoid-critical
activity. The presence of active and systematic elements does not
presuppose the idea of voluntarily directed thinking or of any intellectual
compromise whatsoever; for, as we all know, in paranoia, the active and
systematic structure is consubstantial with the delirium phenomenon itself
— any delirium phenomenon with a paranoid character, even an
instantaneous and sudden one, already involves the systematic structure
“in full” and merely objectifies itself a posteriori by means of critical
intervention.

Critical activity intervenes uniquely as a liquid revealer of systematic

images, associations, coherences, subtleties such as are earnest and
already in existence at the moment in which delirious instantaneity occurs
and which, for the moment to that degree of tangible reality, paranoid-
critical

activity permits to return to objective light. Paranoid-critical activity is an

organising and productive force of objective chance.

Paranoid-critical activity does not consider surrealist images and

phenomena in isolation, but ia a whole coherent context of systematic and
significant relationships. Contrary to the passive, impartial, contemplative
and aesthetic attitude of irrational phenomena, the active, systematic,
organising, cognoscitive attitude of these same phenomena are regarded
as associative, partial, and significant events, in the authentic domain of
our immediate and practical life-experience.

The main point is the systematic-interpretative organisation of surrealist

experimental sensational material, scattered and narcissistic.

In fact, the surrealists events during the course of a day: nocturnal

emissions, distorted memories, dreams, daydreaming, the concrete
transformation of the nighttime phosphene into a hypnagogical image or the
waking phosphene into an objective image, the nutritive whim, intrauterine
claims, anamorphic hysteria, deliberate retention of urine, involuntary
retention of insomnia, the chance image of exclusivist exhibitionism, an
abortive act, a delirious address, regional sneezing, the anal wheelbarrow,
the minute error, Lilliputian malaise, the supernormal physiological state,
the painting one stops oneself from painting, the painting one does paint,
the territorial telephone call, the “upsetting image”, etc, etc, all this, I say,
and a thousand other instantaneous or successive concerns, revealing a
minimum of irrational intentionality, or, just the opposite, a minimum of
suspect phenomenal nullity, are associated, by the mechanisms of the
precise apparatus of paranoid-critical activity, in an indestructible
deliriointerpretative system of political problems, paralytical images,
questions of a more or less mammalian nature, playing the role of an
obsessive idea.

Paranoid-critical activity organises and objectifies exclusivistically the

unlimited and unknown possibilities of the systematic association of
subjective and objective phenomena presenting themselves to us as
irrational concerns, to the exclusive advantage of the obsessive idea.

Paranoid-critical activity thus reveals new and objective “meanings” of the

irrational; it tangibly makes the very world of delirium pass to the level of
reality.

Paranoid phenomena: well-known images with a double figuration — the

figuration can be multiplied theoretically and practically-everything hinges
on the paranoid capacity of the author.

The basis of associative mechanisms and the renewal of obsessive ideas

permits, as is the case in a recent painting of Salvador Dali’s, the
presentation, in the course of elaboration, of six simultaneous images none
of which undergo the slightest figurative transformation — an athlete’s
torso, a lion’s head, a general’s head, a horse, the bust of a shepherdess,
a skull.

Different spectators see different images in the same painting; it goes

without saying that the realisation is scrupulously realistic.

An example of paranoid-critical activity: Salvador Dali’s next book, "The

Tragic Myth of Millet’s 'Angelus',” in which the method of paranoid-critical
activity is applied to the delirium fact that constitutes the obsessional
character of Millet’s painting.

Art history must therefore be refurbished in accordance with the method of

“paranoid-critical activity”; according to this method, such apparently
dissimilar paintings as Leonardo’s "Mona Lisa", Millet’s "Angelus",
Watteau’s "Embarkation for Cythera" actually depict the very same subject
matter, that is to say, exactly the same thing.

THE ABJECTION AND MISERY OF ABSTRACTION-CREATION

The flagrant lack of philosophic and general culture in the cheerful

propellers of that model of mental deficiency that calls itself abstract art,
abstraction-creation, nonfigurative art, etc, is one of the authentically
sweetest things from the viewpoint of the intellectual and “modern”
desolation of our era.
Retarded Kantians, sticky with their scatological golden means, never stop
wanting to offer us on the new optimism of their shiny paper, this soup of
abstract aesthetics, which in reality is even worse than those colossally
sordid warmed-up noodle soups of neo-Thomism, which even the most
convulsively famished cats wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot pole.

If, as they claim, forms and colours have their own aesthetic value beyond
their “representational” value and their anecdotal meaning, then bow could
they resolve and explain the classical paranoid image,with its double and
simultaneous representation, which can easily offer a strictly imitative
image, ineffective from their point of view and yet, with no change, an
image that’s plastically valid and rich?

Such is the case with that tiny ultra-anecdotal figurine of a sprightly

reclining pickaninny in the style of Meissonier; the boy, if looked at
vertically is merely the ultra-rich and even plastically succulent shadow of a
Pompeian nose — highly respectable on account of its degree of
abstraction-creation!

The ingenious experiment of Picasso simply proves the material conditional

nature, the deifying and ineluctable nature, in regard to the physical and
geometric precisions of aesthetic systems, biological and frenetic systems
of the concrete object. Since I feel inspired to do so, permit me to speak to
you in verse:

The biological and

dynastic phenomenon

that constitutes the Cubism

of Picasso

was

the first great imaginative cannibalism

surpassing the experimental ambitions

of modern mathematical

physics. Picasso’s life

will form the not yet understood

polemical basis

in accordance with which

physical psychology

will reopen

a gap of living flesh

and obscurity

in philosophy.

For because

of the anarchic and systematic

materialist

thought

of

Picasso

we shall know physically

experimentally
and without the

“problematic” psychological innovations

with a Kantian flavour

of the “gestalt-ists”

all the misery

of

objects of conscience

localised and comfortable

with their cowardly atoms

the infinite and

diplomatic

sensations.

For the hypermaterialist thought

of Picasso

proves

that the cannibalism of the race

devours

“the intellectual species”

that

regional wine

soaks

the family fly

of the phenomenologist mathematics

of

the future

that there is such a thing as extra-psychological

“strict figures”

intermediary

between

the imaginative fat

and

the monetary idealisms

between

transfinite arithmetics

and sanguinary mathematics

between the “structural” entity

of an “obsessive sole”

and the conduct of living beings

in contact with the “obsessive sole”

for the sole in question

remains

totally exterior

to the understanding

of
the gestalt theory

since

this theory of the strict

figure

and structure

has no

physical means

allowing

the analysis

or even

the registering

of human behaviour

with regard to

structures

and figures

objectively

manifest

as

physically delirious

for

there is no such

thing now
as far as I know

as a physics

of psychopathology

a physics of paranoia

which might be considered

simply

the experimental basis

of the coming

philosophy

of the

psychopathology

the coming

philosophy of “paranoid-critical” activity

which some day

I shall try to envisage polemically

If I have the time

and the inclination.

"Singularities", circa 1936

HERACLITUS’ TEARS

There exists a perpetual and synchronic physical materialisation of the

great semblances of thought such as Heraclitus meant when he intelligently
wept his heart out at the self-modesty of nature.

The Greeks realised it in their statues of psychological gods, a

transformation of the obscure and turbulent passions of man into a clear,
analytical, and carnal anatomy.

Today, physics is the new geometry of thought; and, while for the Greeks,
space such as Euclid understood it was merely an extremely distant
abstraction inaccessible to the timid “three-dimensional continuum” that
Descartes was to proclaim later on, nowadays space has, as you know,
become a terribly material, terribly personal, and terribly meaningful
physical object that squeezes us all like real blackheads.

Whereas the Greeks, as I have said above, materialised their Euclidean

psychology and feelings in the nostalgic and divine muscular clarity of their
sculptors, Salvador Dali, faced in 1935 with the anguishing and colossal
problem of Einsteinian space-time, is not content with anthropomorphism,
libidinous arithmetic, or flesh: instead, be makes cheese.

Take my word for it, Salvador Dali’s famous melted watches are nothing
but tender paranoid-critical Camembert, the extravagant and solitary
Camembert of time and space.

In conclusion, I must beg your pardon, before the authentic famine that I
assume honours my readers, for having begun this theoretical meal, which
one might have hoped to be wild and cannibalistic, with the civilised
imponderable factor of caviar and finishing it with the even headier and
deliquescent imponderable of Camembert.

Don’t let yourself be taken in: these two superfine semblances of the
imponderable conceal a finer, well-known, sanguinary, and irrational grilled
cutlet that will eat all of us up.

Palette:

lorca's 'Ode to Dali'

1904-1929, Spain, Cadaques, Dali Museum Florida, Family, Gala,

Morse, Religion & the occult

ali’s sister Ana Maria was born. Seen here in his 1924 portrait, she would
be almost the only female model in his paintings until he met his wife Gala
in 1929. In 1949 she published a memoir, “Dali as Seen by His Sister”.

Dali was, by his own ready admission, thoroughly spoiled by his family.
Apart from being barred from fraternising with the household staff in the
kitchen, he wrote in “The Secret Life”, “I was allowed to do anything I
pleased. I wet my bed till I was eight for the sheer fun of it. I was the
absolute monarch of the house. Nothing was good enough for me. My
father and mother worshiped me.

“On the day of the Feast of Kings I received among innumerable gifts a
dazzling king’s costume — a gold crown studded with great topazes and
an ermine cape; from that time on I lived almost continually disguised in
this costume.”
Perhaps inevitably, his sister would suffer as a result of Salvador’s
elevated status in the household. When he was six, in 1910, he recalled,
the appearance of Halley’s comet created quite a stir. When everyone
rushed up to the terrace of the house one day upon hearing that it was
visible, Dali remained paralysed because someone had suggested its tail
might touch the earth and destroy it.

When he finally set out to join them he noticed Ana crawling through a
doorway.

“I stopped, hesitated a second, then gave her a terrible kick in the head as
though it had been a ball, and continued running, carried away with a
‘delirious joy’ induced by this savage act.

“But my father, who was behind me, caught me and led me down into his
office, where I remained for punishment till dinnertime.

“The fact of not having been allowed to see the comet has remained
seared in my memory as one of the most intolerable frustrations of my life.
I screamed with such rage that I completely lost my voice.

“Noticing how this frightened my parents, I learned to make use of the

stratagem on the slightest provocation.

“On another occasion when I happened to choke on a fishbone my father,

who couldn’t stand such things, got up and left the dining room holding his
head between his hands. Thereafter on several occasions I simulated the
hacking and hysterical convulsions that accompany such choking just to
observe my father’s reaction and to attract an anguished and exclusive
attention to my person.”

Salvador’s brutal kicking of his sister didn’t prevent him from lunging to her
defence when the family doctor came to the house to pierce her earlobes.
Reacting to what he perceived as “outrageous cruelty”, he waited for the
doctor to settle into position to perform the operation.

“Then I broke into the room brandishing my leather-thonged mattress

beater and whipped the doctor right across the face, breaking his glasses.
He was quite an old man and he cried out with pain. When my father came
running in he fell on his shoulder …

“Since then I loved to be sick, if only for the pleasure of seeing the little
face of that old man whom I had reduced to tears.”

In “The Secret Life”, Dali happily chronicled his horrendous childhood

behaviour. It should be stressed, however, that biographer Ian Gibson
found little that was bizarre in Dali’s youth, the suggestion being that
Salvador deliberately invented myths to enliven this era and cast himself in
a cruel and macabre light.

Dali remembered catching a bat and biting it nearly in two, and at school
— the Immaculate Conception primary school, run by the Brothers of the
Marist Order — deliberately throwing himself down stone staircases just so
he could relish the attention he received.
“The Broken Bridge and the Dream”, 1945

Earlier in his autobiography, Dali described another cruel episode. He was

five at the time, and walking alongside a smaller boy on a tricycle, pushing
him along. They were on the edge of the village of “Cambrils near
Barcelona”, he wrote, and came to a bridge under construction.

Salvador was suddenly seized with the impulse to injure the boy. He made
sure no one was watching and pushed the child over the edge, sending
him five metres to the rocks below.

The boy was laid up for a week “with a badly injured head”, but in the initial
commotion back at the house, Dali sat in a parlour chair quietly eating
cherries. “I don’t recall having experienced the slightest feeling of guilt over
this incident,” he wrote.

“There is no doubt that Dali really committed this atrocious deed,” Carlos
Rojas and Alma Amell insist in their 1993 biography “Salvador Dali, Or The
Art of Spitting on Your Mother’s Portrait”.

They note with surprise, though, that “as if his superego censored at least
a symbolic part of these memories, he gives the wrong name for the
place”.

Since he places the location near Barcelona, they say, it couldn’t have
been Cambrils, which is in Tarragona, but Cabrils, some 120 kilometres
away. Below is a almost surrealistic Google Earth image of houses on a
hill in Cabrils.
Rosa Salleras, another Figueras native, was a childhood friend of Dali’s,
six years younger but a frequent playmate, “a kind of younger sister”, as
Ewen Carmichael described her in a 2004 article for the Scotsman, a
recollection of meeting her before her death two years earlier.

Their parents’ summer homes were next to each other in Cadaqués, and
when Rosa was nine and Dali 16 he painted her “standing high above the
Bay of Cadaqués”.

“On first glance it appears raw and amateurish,” Carmichael wrote, “but on
closer inspection the true genius of Dali shines through. It is an
extraordinary painting for one so young and captured the mood of the
child-woman.”

Rosa said Dali, always short of money and materials, painted a landscape
on the reverse side.

It’s not clear what painting they’re discussing, but the 1918 canvas above
— “View of Port d’Alguer, Cadaqués” in the collection of the Dali Museum
in Florida — was originally owned by “Rosa Salleras de Naveira”, and then
by Barcelona’s Galeria Maragall, where Eleanor and Reynolds Morse
purchased it.
Below, two canvases that might “stand in”, but painted much later and
hardly “amateurish”.

“Girl of Cadaques”, from 1926

“Portrait of a Girl in a Landscape (Cadaques)”, circa 1926

Rosa remembered Dali — who she characterised as timid, shy and always
blushing in front of girls — teaching her to catch bats by tying white cloths
to the top of poles and waving them around until the bats fell exhausted to
the ground.

Dali’s father, she said, “was a sort of dictatorial man” who reminded her of
Mussolini.

And Rosa remembered, as well, Ana Maria’s dismay when Gala arrived on
the scene.

Dali’s sister “was furious”, she said. “And she was hurt. I think she was
very jealous because she was always in the front row. Whenever Salvador
was invited, Ana Maria was invited. She was the first lady. Then when
Salvador met and married Gala, Ana Maria didn’t have any place.”
0 Comments

1904-1929, 1930-1939, Spain, Paris, Cadaques, Da Vinci, Family,

Picasso, Sex, Vermeer, Velazquez

The promise of the Tower Mill

The Pichot family of Barcelona — the name is often seen as Pixtot, the
Catalan version, and Dali spelled it Pitchot in his 1942 autobiography —
also had a farm-estate just outside Figueras called El Moli de la Torre, the
Tower Mill.

Various sources say it’s just on the way into town along the highway that
runs from Roses on the Cap de Creus peninsula across the Empordà plain.
In the Google Earth image above you can see the husks of some
buildings. The N-260 motorway from Roses slices up into Figueras,
parallel with the smaller Carrer del Port de la Selva. The blacktop
thoroughfare looping off the N-260, past the ruins, is Cami del Moli. The
area is all industrial, with a water-purification plant nearby and, alongside
the Cami del Moli, a canal that, at a stretch, might once have powered a
mill.

It’s not much evidence on which to hang a claim that this is where Dali
“learned to paint”, at the Pichot family business, a fulling mill, but his story
is prone to apparitions in the heat of the Catalonian sun.
Fulling mills, sometimes called tucking or walking mills, are where cloth,
usually woollen, is cleaned of oil, dirt and other impurities, a process that
makes it thicker. The adolescent Dali was more interested in other things
he found on the estate, the female family members and labourers included.

There were, most importantly though, Ramon Pichot’s paintings, hung

throughout the house, a source of fascination for Salvador, who in turn
began committing the surrounding landscape to canvas as early as 1914.

Salvador was a chronically ill child, and not all of his ailments were
imaginary, so “my parents decided to send me to the country for a rest; I
was to visit the Pitchot family.

“My parents before me had already undergone the influence of the

personality of the Pitchot family. All of them were artists and possessed
great gifts and an unerring taste. Ramon Pitchot was a painter, Ricardo a
cellist, Luis a violinist, Maria a contralto who sang in the opera.

“Pepito was, perhaps, the most artistic of all without, however, having
cultivated any of the fine arts in particular. But it was he who created the
house at Cadaques, and who had a unique sense of the garden and of life
in general.

“Mercedes, too, was a Pitchot 100 per cent, and she was possessed of a
mystical and fanatical sense of the house. She married that great Spanish
poet Eduardo Marquina, who brought to the picturesque realism of this
Catalonian family the Castillian note of austerity and of delicacy which was
necessary for the climate of civilisation of the Pitchot family to achieve its
exact point of maturity.”
Pepito Pichot persuaded Dali’s father to let the boy take lessons from the
German portrait and landscape artist Siegfrid Burmann, who was staying in
Cadaques at the time.

The mill’s tower resonated like a dream image in “The Dream Approaches”
from 1933, above, and below, “The Horseman of Death” and “The Tower”,
both from a year later.

In “The Dream Approaches”, a sheet covers what could be a coffin, atop

which sits an object resembling female genitalia. The tower is a decrepit
symbol of death as well as desire. In his autobiography Dali recalled the
tower mill as the setting for his first sexual — and violent — urges toward a
girl. There’s little doubt that the tower recurs in his art as a phallic symbol.

‘’Naked, and comparing myself to my schoolfriends, I discovered that my

penis was small, pitiful and soft,” Dali told Andre Parinaud in 1976 for what
became “The Unspeakable Confessions Of Salvador Dali”.

“I can recall a pornographic novel whose Don Juan machine-gunned

female genitals with ferocious glee, saying that he enjoyed hearing women
creak like watermelons. I convinced myself that I would never be able to
make a woman creak like a watermelon.”
Having a small penis is a common self-criticism among men, of course, but
biographer Ian Gibson, having scoured Salvador’s adolescent writings with
a magnifying glass, said he’d found ample evidence in the frank
outpourings that the young Dali’s relationship with his first girlfriend had
suffered because of his shortcoming and he ended up masturbating
frequently.

Presumably the “revelation” is important to art historians trying to track the

meaning of Dali’s paintings, in which masturbation, like the tower, was a
regular theme.

Louis Markoya of the Collect Dali Yahoo Group, Dali’s protege in the
1970s, has serious doubts about Gibson’s credibility, but points out that
Salvador had his own spin on the subject in his book “Dali on Modern Art:
The Cuckolds of Antiquated Modern Art”. Intriguingly, he said he could tell
the size of any given artist’s penis by his work.

The artists he disliked most tended to have large penises that he said
weighed them down and made them stupid and incapable of painting or
drawing anything beautiful. The reverse was true for geniuses, including
himself, Raphael, Vermeer, Leonardo and Velazquez. (He rated himself
against these same individuals as an artist, too. See this post.)

“Not only did the smaller glans allow you to be a genius (’allowing a
lightness only angels can appreciate and acquire’), but it brought you
further along on the evolutionary scale, closer to the angels themselves,”
Louis says by way of explaining Dali’s reasoning.
“As with many things Dali, he cited some proofs which included the sizes of
Raphael’s cherubs’ penises, and the size of Leonardo’s ‘Vitruvian Man’,
whom he insisted was modelled after Leonardo himself.

“One place Dali said he was stumped,” Louis continues, “was with Picasso,
who, Dali said, had a large penis, and was also a genius, something that
Dali said was no easy feat, and it even garnered extra admiration for his
Spanish compatriot — but at the same time he cuckolded him, since Dali
was naturally more evolved, angelic and capable of ascension.”

Sold at auction in 2007 for $2,368,000, “Nostalgic Echo” from 1935

features another sort of tower, this one the belltower at Ana Maria Dali’s
school in Figueras, according to Robert Descharnes. A girl skipping rope
can be seen inside, an echo of the figure on the ground before it.

Even Descharnes, Dali’s close friend and the most widely accepted
authority on his work, couldn’t place the other elements, but in 1941
Museum of Modern Art curator James Thrall Soby suggested a keyhole
forming the letter “i” in the pentagonal portal, an image repeated by the bell
tower.

“Morphological Echo” came after this work, and Giorgio de Chirico’s

“Mystery and Melancholy of a Street” preceded it, and from the latter there
is indeed an echo of imminent danger in the isolation.
“De Chirico’s calm and tranquility,” Dali said, “was dramatic because
constantly threatened. All that geometric anaesthesia was moving because
it abandoned futurism and vaguely foreshadowed surrealism”.

Detail from “A Hairdresser Preoccupied by the Persistence of Good

Weather”, 1932

Just as crucially in the Dali hierarchy of emblems, the Tower Mill was the
first place he ever saw a crutch, and he explained in “The Secret Life” how
it came to be such a ubiquitous feature of his art.

He and his cousin Julia were helping fetch ladders for the linden-blossom
pickers from the tower attic, “immense and dark, cluttered with
miscellaneous objects” and heretofore out of bounds to him.

“I immediately discovered two objects which stood out with a surprising

personality.” One was a crown of gilded laurel stems that had been made
for an opera star performing in Barcelona, and the second was a crutch, of
which Dali immediately took possession.

“I felt that I should never again in my life be able to separate myself from it,
such was the fetishistic fanaticism which seized me at the very first without
my being able to explain it. The superb crutch!

“Already it appeared to me as the object possessing the height of authority

and solemnity. It immediately replaced the old mattress beater with leather
fringes which I had adopted a long time ago as a sceptre and which I had
lost one day …

“I victoriously descended into the garden, hobbling solemnly with my crutch

in one hand. This object communicated to me an assurance, an arrogance
even, which I had never been capable of until then.”

SUPPORT GROUP: Clockwise from top left, “The Persistence of Fine

Weather” detail, “Meditation on the Harp”, “The Spectre of Sex Appeal”
detail and “Average Atmospherocephalic Bureaucrat in the Act of Making a
Cranial Harp”

The totemic power of his crutch was bolstered when he used it to poke at
and then flip over his pet hedgehog when he found it dead and maggot-
ridden. Clearly it was a tool useful even against death, and it came in
supremely handy again a decade later, when Dali was struggling to gain
entry into Paris high society.

He reasoned that the artistocratic and wealthy were “people who, instead of
standing on the world with both feet, balance themselves on a single foot,
like storks”, keeping in touch with “the common base of the world only by
what is strictly necessary”.

This they did by tolerating the occasional “pederastic and drug-addicted

artists”. Dali would gain their support, he decided, by being their crutch
instead of these pitiful creatures.
“I had the original idea of not coming with empty hands, like all the rest. I
arrived, in fact, with my arms loaded with crutches! One thing I realised
immediately: It would take quantities and quantities of crutches to give a
semblance of solidity …

“And I inaugurated the ‘pathetic crutch’ … to support the monstrous

development of certain atmospheric-cephalic skulls … crutches to make
architectural and durable the fugitive pose of a choreographic leap, to pin
the ephemeral butterfly of the dancer with pins that would keep her poised
for eternity. Crutches, crutches, crutches, crutches.

“I even invented a tiny facial crutch of gold and rubies [based on the one
found in “Self-portrait with Fried Bacon” — see this post]. Its bifurcated
part was flexible and was intended to hold up and fit the tip of the nose.
The other end was softly rounded and was designed to lean on the central
hollow above the upper lip. It was therefore a nose crutch, an absolutely
useless kind of object to appeal to the snobbism of certain criminally
elegant women, just as some beings wear monocles without having any
other need of them than to feel the sacred tug of their exhibitionism
incrusted in the flesh of their own face.”

“My symbol of the crutch so adequately fitted and continues to fit into the
unconscious myths of our epoch that, far from tiring us, this fetish has
come to please everyone more and more …

“When I had made my first attempt at keeping the aristocracy standing

upright by propping it with a thousand crutches, I looked it in the face and
said to it honestly, ‘Now I am going to give you a terrible kick in the leg.’
“The aristocracy drew up a little more the leg that it kept lifted, like a stork.
‘Go ahead,’ it answered, and gritted its teeth to endure the pain stoically,
without a cry.

Then, using all my might, I gave it a terrific kick right in the shin.

“It did not budge. I had therefore propped it well. ‘Thank you,’ it said to
me. ‘Never fear,’ I answered as I left, kissing its hand, ‘I’ll be back. With
the pride of your one leg and the crutches of my intelligence, you are
stronger than the revolution that is being prepared by the intellectuals,
whom I know intimately.

“‘You are old, and dead with fatigue, and you have fallen from your high
place, but the spot where your foot is soldered to the earth is tradition. If
you should happen to die, I would come at once and place my own foot in
that very imprint of tradition which has been yours, and immediately I would
curl up my other leg like a stork. I am ready and able to grow old in this
attitude, without tiring.’”

“The Average, Fine and Invisible Harp”, 1934

0 Comments

1904-1929, 1970-1979, 1980-Forever, Spain, Dali Theatre-Museum,

Figueras, Gala, Pubol Castle, Meissonier

The Dali Theatre-Museum

@

The original theatre structure in which the museum now stands was
designed by architect Roca i Bros. It burned down in 1939 and remained a
gutted husk until Dali was convinced to place his museum there.

The museum officially opened on September 28, 1974, and the adjoining
Torre Gorgot became part of it later, rechristened Torre Galatea. This is
where he lived in his old age, following Gala’s death, and where the Gala-
Salvador Dali Foundation now has its offices.

In the courtyard garden that now spans the area where the theatre stalls
once perched is the installation entitled “Car-naval”, which includes one of
the Dalis’ Cadillacs, on which Ernst Fuchs’ statue of Queen Esther rides; a
marble bust by François Girardon; a reproduction of Michelangelo’s “The
Slave”; and, as seen in the photo above, a boat that once belonged to
Gala and a column of car tires.
Nearby is the Rainy Taxi, and ringing the courtyard are paintings by Evarist
Vallès.

Also on the ground floor are the Sala de Peixateries — the Fish Shop —
which is where you can see “Soft Self-portrait with Grilled Bacon” and
“Portrait of Picasso”. Another room with Dali’s drawings on view connects
to the maestro’s crypt.

Few visitors realise they are walking directly about the tomb as they cross
the white marble slab in the middle of the red-brick floor of the main hall.
The crypt is behind a wall decorated with a cross and the words “Salvador
Dali Domeneci, Pubol Markisi, 1904-1989″.

The theatre’s old stage, now crowned by a geodesic dome designed by

Emilio Pérez Piñero, is occupied by Dali’s towering backdrop for the ballet
“Labyrinth”, and to one side is “Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean Sea
Which at Twenty Metres Becomes the Portrait of Abraham Lincoln”.

To the left is the Sala del Tresor — the Treasure Room — which has
“Basket of Bread”, “Galarina”, “Atomic Leda” and “The Spectre of Sex
Appeal” on view. To the right is the popular Mae West Room.

On the next floor up is the Sala Palau del Vent — the Wind Palace Room.
Here, where Dali exhibited his art in public for the first time at age 14, is
the Sistine-like ceiling fresco he toiled on during the mid-1970s. He
painted himself and Gala as if ascending into Heaven, and from their
torsos, cabinet drawers open to pour out gold coins.

A post by “Eric” on the website Classical Values claims this artwork,

featured in an “official Dali calendar” one year, is somehow related to the
museum’s geodesic cupola, showing 16 figures arrayed as if part of a
zodiac.

In the adjacent room is “Poetry of America”, and to the left the Sala de les
Joies — the Jewel Room — with 39 pieces Dali designed between 1932
and 1970, along with the preparatory drawings.

On the third floor Dali’s private art collection is shown, including works by
Meissonier, Fortuny, Modest Urgell, Gerard Dou, El Greco, Marcel
Duchamp and Bouguereau along with some of his own, such as “Automatic
Beginning of a Portrait of Gala”.

On the second floor is the gallery of paintings by Antoni Pichot, of the local
family that meant so much to Dali.

Appointed by Dali the theatre-museum’s director, Antoni Pichot was at his

side daily the last nine years of his life, watching him putter as best he
could, listening always to the music of “Tristan and Isolde”.
When Dali asked him to run his museum Pichot balked. “I’m a painter, not
a manager.”

“That’s exactly what I want,” Dali replied, “a manager who doesn’t do

anything! You’re perfect.”

Pichot remembered first meeting Dali in 1950. His father took him along at
the end of each summer to see what the maestro had come up with, and
that summer, he said it was “The Last Supper”. Pichot can be forgiven for
slipping on the year: “The Sacrament of the Last Supper” was done in
1955.

The Pichot’s home in Figueras was levelled by a bomb during the civil war,
and they moved to San Sebastian. There, Antoni’s drawing instructor was
none other than Juan Nuñez Fernández, who had taught Dali in Figueras
30 years before.

In 1972 Dali had a chance to see Pichot’s studio and enigmatically

pronounced his one of his works “the painting of Opus Dei”. He carted it
off, and the next day phoned to ask Antoni to help him with the museum,
where his art would appear on permanent display.

Pichot paints the rocks of Cape Creus, seeing in each stone people and
stories that almost suggest a paranoiac-critical approach.
Dali had once coached him: “Spread an armload of your beach stones on
a table and you get ‘The Battle of Constantine’ by Raphael. Let’s see if
you’re able to paint that.” Antoni obliged, and Dali wrote the the
introduction for Pichot’s 1958 Barcelona exhibition where his own “The
Battle of Constantine” was featured.

When the rocks awaken from their long sleep, he said, the noise is that of
a ferocious battle.

The four “monsters” in the theatre-museum are pieces Pichot created with
Dali in 1975, made with rocks, boards, tree limbs, parts of a whale skeleton
and conch shells.

Above and right, Dali makes a grand show for the press photographers on
an October 1968 visit to the Spanish Congress in Madrid.

He was in the capital to make a pitch to state minister Sanchez-Arjona on

behalf of the museum in Figueras.

The theatre-museum may well have remained a dream had it not been for
Figueras’ mayor in the early 1960s, Ramon Guardiola. Dali unveiled plans
for the museum at a reception the town held in his honour on August 12,
1961. Guardiola knew from the start what he was up against if he was to
help Dali make this dream a reality: Two prominent government officials
found excuses not to attend the reception.
The party was a success just the same, even if a fierce north wind
prevented a helicopter from hauling off the dead bull from the “surrealist
corrida” Dali had arranged. The town council presented him with a medal it
had minted for the occasion, the Silver Leaf, and unveiled a plaque on the
house where he was born. And, amid the ruins of the old municipal theatre,
the artist revealed his grand scheme for a museum of his own.

The fund-raising was now to begin, but Guardiola soon learned that there
was scant enthusiasm about donating money to support the project. In
terms of officialdom, only the head of the Girona regional government and
a few prominent citizens were interested.

Just the same, Guardiola hired architect Ros de Ramis and secured a
small grant from the Information and Tourism Ministry. Dali didn’t help
matters by announcing that, based on his belief that originals and
reproductions would have the same value in the future, he would fill the
museum with copies of his paintings.

He then asked that one of Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes be erected

over the museum courtyard. And when work on the museum failed to
begin, he threatened to move the project to Paris or Perpignan instead.

Gala put in her two pesetas, telling Guardiola that if construction hadn’t
begun by the time she and Salvador returned the following spring, she
would “send six anarchists from Paris to blow up what remains of the
theatre”.
A close-up of the drenched mannequin inside the “Rainy Taxi” at the
museum.

For his anguish, belatedly, the town of Figueras posthumously awarded the
Silver Leaf to Guardiola in 1975, in recognition of his role in the museum’s
construction.

Guardiola had moved to Figueras in 1950, and five years later met Dali at
the local high school, which at the time was the provisional home of the
Museum of the Empordà. Dali promised some of his artwork, though
nothing ever came of it.

Guardiola tried again, this time asking Dali to provide something for the title
page of the museum magazine’s December 1955 issue. This he did, and
at the same time he developed an admiration for Guardiola’s knowledge
about plant cultivation.

When, on his annual return to Port Lligat in the spring of 1956, Dali found
that a winter chill had killed off most of the olive trees in the area, he was
heartsick. Olives meant a great deal to him. He often called Gala “Oliveta”,
and García Lorca had referred to Dali’s “olive-coloured voice”. The olive
groves of Cadaques were to Dali like “some grey and venerable hairs that
crown the philosophical head of the hills”.

So he sought Guardiola’s advice, and an expert was found who offered a

formula with which to treat the ailing trees. Dali prepared the potion
himself, and within a few weeks there were again signs of life. He packed
some specimens in a box and took them to the agricultural institute in
Girona for analysis.

When the box was opened, a cloud of insects fell out. The cause was
found, and the remedy, and most of the olive trees were saved.

Below, a photo of Dali evaluating the sketches of art students who would
visit the museum and consult him on a weekly basis at times during the
1970s.

2 Comments

1904-1929, Spain, Cadaques, Family, Figueras, Religion & the occult

In a festive mood

Every January 20, the feast day of Saint Sebastian, the more pious citizens
of Cadaques climb a steep path in a 90-minute procession up Mount Pení
to the Sant Sebastià Hermitage, an old house perched in the midst of cork
oak. The photo below was posted by lluiscanyet on Panoramio.
I’ve read that it’s owned by Sebastian Guinness, a scion of the Irish
brewing family who owns a gallery in Dublin named for him. For its opening
in 2008 Guinness produced the “lost” Warhol portrait of Farah Diba
Pahlavi, the exiled empress of Iran, claiming he’d bought from the Warhol
estate.

At any rate, the structure partway up 600-metre Mount Pení is privately

owned and opened to the public only on January 20. From the property
you can pick out fragments of the landscape that Dali painted in his youth.
Just to the south is the Pichot family’s summer house.

In earlier centuries the hermitage doubled as a talaia — a look-out from

which the villagers could watch for approaching pirates, whose harbour
raids were a frequent menace.

Dali was 16 or 17 when he painted “Fiesta at the Hermitage”, above, and

with a detail below, on one side of a piece of cardboard and “The Fair of
the Holy Cross at Figueras”, show a little further down, on the other.

The first depicts a celebration of feast day of Saint Sebastian. Dali included
himself chatting up a pair of young women who are arm in arm.
Dali biographer Dawn Ades glimpsed his political interests in “Fiesta at the
Hermitage”, a “subtle sense of social division” in the isolation of the gypsy
in a headscarf in the centre.

The second side, the verso, has the annual fete of the title on the feast day
of the Holy Cross in May, for which Dali was hired to paint posters. It’s
chaotic, and Dali probably deliberately tried to tone this down in his later,
simpler, less populous pictures of town fetes.

Here he was trying to capture what he termed the “living bazaar, a great
music box” that during the festivities engulfed Plaça de la Palmera, where
his family lived (Dali was by then in Madrid). Footballers and bullfighters
mingle with gypsies and circus performers, bashful girls and shameless
boys.

Football was just catching on in Figueras, and two of Dali’s schoolmates,

Jaume Miravidles and Joan Maria Torres, played for Unió Esportiva. He
did portraits of both, and shown here is that of Miravidles.

Both sides of the double painting of the festivals are finished works,
together now on view at the Dali-Theatre Museum, but the “Hermitage”
side was originally shown along with seven other paintings Dali contributed
to the Catalan Students Association exhibition at the Dalmau Gallery in
Barcelona in late January 1922.
The dual painting was shown publicly again a few months later, at the
Exhibition of Empordà Artists in Figueras, though it’s not known which
side.

Critics found them derivative, but even if Dali winced at perceived allusions
to Nogués and other artists, he took them overall as a compliment.

Dali’s sister Ana Maria described the church festivals in her 1951 book “All
Year Round in Cadaqués”.

On the feast of Saint Sebastian, to this day, the parish priest carries a
baroque statue of the saint in procession up a hill, through the olive groves,
to the church, leading a band of musicians and the faithful.

“Romeria — Pilgrimage”, from 1921

“The young girls, with red, blue, magenta and yellow dresses, seem like
flowers amidst the earthy greyness of the old ladies’ dresses,” Ana Maria
Dali wrote. “Just like an allegory to the earth and the flowers born of it.

“Everybody carries bags, baskets full of meat, wine bottles, baskets of sea
urchins. The odd dog, of the sort that they call around here ‘basket dogs’,
because they have the job of guarding the food bag while the master
works, follows along friskily and absent-mindedly. The very young couples
hang back a little behind the others, holding hands.”
At the top of the hill by the chapel a luncheon of seafood and ribs is
prepared as music for sardana dancing is played, while inside the church
“the Saint Sebastian songs are sung”.

Soon after his decommissioning from the army in 1927, while summering in
Cadaques with Garcia Lorca, Dali wrote a poem titled “Saint Sebastián”
that was published in L’Amic de les Aris and the newspaper El Gallo.

The cleverly poetic prose sent a ripple through Catalan literati. Dali
concocted a metaphor between the arrow-riddled saint finding armour in
his faith and the artist patiently letting his painting “ripen”, and elaborated
on his ideas about painting being more precise than photography.

The painting shown here is “Saint Sebastian” from 1982.

Lorca's 'Ode to Dali'

86 Words 133 617words 23272 words 23330/ 460 words 23823 960
words. 23907/1050 23981/ 1140 24233/1392 24289/1442