Art of the 20th Century



 

Art Styles in 20th century Art Map



 

The Proof of Love



1929 - 1935




 

The year 1929 was a decisive year for Dali. It marked the turning point at which he was recognized as a paid-up card-carrying Surrealist. Not that this would have gone so smoothly had it not been for the skilful assistance of Miro. "It's going to be hard for you," he had told Dali. "Don't talk too much" - at this point, Dali noted in the Secret Life, he understood that perhaps Miro's silence was a tactic -"and try to do some physical culture. I have a boxing instructor, and I train every evening. [...] Tomorrow we'll go and visit Tristan Tzara, who was the leader of the Dadaists. He is influential. He'll perhaps invite us to go to a concert. We must refuse. We must keep away from music as from the plague. [...] The important thing in life is to be stubborn. When what I'm looking for doesn't come out in my paintings I knock my head furiously against the wall till it's bloody." (Dali had a vision of Miro's bloody wall, and noted: "It was the same blood as my own.")

While Dali 'was waiting for Un Chien Andalou "to plunge right into the heart of witty, elegant and intellectualized Paris", Bunuel was in fact still busy editing the film. In 1929, Eugenio Montes wrote that the film was "an event in the history of the cinema, writ in blood as Nietzsche would have wished and as has always been the Spanish way." And he continued: "Bunuel and Dali have just placed themselves resolutely beyond the pale of what is called good taste, beyond the pale of the pretty, the agreeable, the epidermal, the frivolous, the French." For his part, Dali fled Paris once again, for the soothing familiarity of Catalonia. Pleased as he was to be back in the light of Cadaques, though, he still sensed that a change was happening withm him. He had not yet had much contact with the Surrealists, but now he set out to paint "trompe I'ceil photographs", making skilful use of all the tricks he had mastered by then. Dali was a quarter of a century ahead of his time, using techniques that later made him the patron saint of the American photoreahsts. Dali's photographic precision was used for his own distinctive ends, though - to transcribe dream images. It was a method that was to become a constant in his work; the first products, dating from this period, may be considered forerunners of his Surrealist paintings proper. As late as 1973, by which time his definition of his own art had been clarified, he "was still declaring: "My art is handmade photography of extra-fine, extravagant, super-aesthetic images of the concrete irrational."

Even if Dali had not yet conquered Paris, white-washed Cadaques offered him memories of his childhood and adolescence. Now grown to manhood, he felt that he was "trying by every possible means to go mad". Before his departure he had painted all his phantasmagoric private images in a single picture, Little Cinders; and now on his return he found that his fetishist vision was a steadfast thing. The images in that painting meant a great deal to Dali: they represented memories, fetishist obsessions, love-hate likenesses (including the head of Lorca), hallucinations. It was the first in a series of paintings that were to lead Dali to the absolute freedom of his "paranoiac-critical" approach; it was also the only one Dali mentions having painted during his military service. He seems to have finished it in 1928. Dali identified the items in the picture as a metre ruler, signifying the obsession of a liberating imbalance; the ass's cadaver, pure as mica; the bird-cum-fish, standing for illusions that contain within them the diversity of concrete fact; a hand, for a woman friend seen in a waking dream; a severed head, for melancholy caused by space-time; an anatomical head, for corrosive reality; a thumb, for rare and disturbing things; ambivalent shapes, for the intervention of desire; flies as God's way of pointing mankind to the most hidden laws of the universe; blood, for the independent process of becoming; the guitars and geometrical figures, for spatial presentation of pre-natal memories and mythic childhood. Thus Dali.

At the time of The Stinking Ass - which he considered far superior to Bunuel's film - and Nude Woman Seated in an Armchair, which he painted violently, poking a finger into the canvas to mark the navel and impishly calling the dribble of paint down the canvas a nude woman, Dali worked in a state of exalted tension punctuated with "spasmodic explosions of laughter". In his Secret Life he reported that he could be heard out in the garden, where his father, "amused and preoccupied as he watered a skeletal rosebush wilting in the heat", would observe: "That child laughing again!"

Dali set to work on two paintings that inaugurated his Surrealist period: The Enigma of Desire - my Mother, my Mother, my Mother and The Lugubrious Game. The latter took its title from the French poet Paul Eluard. The figure wearing shit-stained underpants made the painting notorious in Barcelona even before the scandal shocked the Surrealists. In the former painting, the baroque superstructure emblazoned with the words ma mere is taken from the windblown geological rock formations of Cape Creus, with a little imaginative help from the architectural genius of Antom Gaudi.

At the very moment he finished this painting, Dali came across a coloured lithograph of the Sacred Heart at the Rambla in Figueras, and wrote on it: "Sometimes I spit on the picture of my mother for the fun of it." In his view (he subsequently explained in justification) it was perfectly possible to love one's mother wholeheartedly and still dream of spitting on her; indeed, he pointed out, in some religions spitting was a sacred act!
 

The Enigma of Desire - my Mother, my Mother, my Mother
1929

 

Study for "the Enigma of Desire - My Mother, My Mother, My Mother"
1929

 

Studies for "The Enigma of Desire" and "Memory of the Child-Woman"
1929

 

Amalgam - Sometimes I Spit on the Portrait of My Mother for the Fun of It
1929

 

The Lugubrious Game
1929

 

Study for "The Lugubrious Game"
1929

Parallel to the painting of The Enigma of Desire, Dali began work on The Great Masturbator, using a colour photograph bought at a fairground, of a woman smelling a lily. Once Dali's brush got to work, of course, it was no longer a lily that the woman was taking to her nose and mouth. His mam obsession at that time can best be termed desire. In Paris he had not succeeded in finding the elegant woman he sought, or even a not so elegant woman to comply with his every erotic fantasy. He had roamed the streets like a dog looking for a bitch, he recalled; but when he did happen across a suitable woman, "timidity" prevented him from talking to her. It was, he declared in retrospect, pitiful that the young artist who set out to conquer Paris could not even conquer a plain Jane.

When he was painting these first Surrealist works, and particularly The Great Masturbator, Dali's mind went back to the unattainable women of Paris: "With my hand, before my wardrobe mirror, I accomplished the rhythmic and solitary sacrifice in which I was going to prolong as much as possible the incipient pleasure looked forward to and contained in all the feminine forms I had looked at longingly that afternoon, whose images, now commanded by the magic of my gesture, reappeared one after another by turn, coming by force to show me of themselves what I had desired in each one! At the end of a long, exhausting and mortal fifteen minutes, having reached the limit of my strength, I wrenched out the ultimate pleasure with all the animal force of my clenched hand, a pleasure mingled as always with the bitter and burning release of my tears - this in the heart of Paris, where I sensed all about me the gleaming foam of the thighs of feminine beds. Salvador Dali lay down alone in his bed [...]"

 

Imperial Monument to the Child-Woman
1929

 

But presently there was good news, for Dali's desires and his bank balance alike. First an enthusiastic telegram arrived from the dealer Camille Goemans, to the effect that, in addition to buying three paintings (to be chosen by Dali) for 3,000 francs, he would exhibit all his work at his Paris gallery once Dali returned to the French capital. Then a group of Surrealists descended upon him, no doubt attracted partly by the Catalonian's eccentricity and partly by the sexual and scatological extravagance of his work. Among them were Rene Magritte and his wife, Luis Bunuel, and above all Paul Eluard and his wife Gala. It was a visit that changed Dali's life.

Dali felt flattered that Paul Eluard should have come to see him. With Andre Breton and Louis Aragon, Eluard was one of the leading lights of the Surrealist movement. As for Gala, she was a revelation - the revelation Dali had been waiting for, indeed expecting. She was the personification of the woman in his childhood dreams to whom he had given the mythical name Galuchka and for whom various young and adolescent girls had already stood in. He recognized her by her naked back; the proof that Gala "was the woman was provided by the fact that her physique was precisely that of the women in most of his paintings and drawings. In the Secret Life he later described her in these terms: "Her body still had the complexion of a child's. Her shoulder blades and the sub-renal muscles had that somewhat sudden athletic tension of an adolescent's. But the small of her back, on the other hand, was extremely feminine and pronounced, and served as an infinitely svelte hyphen between the wilful, energetic and proud leanness of her torso and her very delicate buttocks which the exaggerated slenderness of her waist enhanced and rendered greatly more desirable."

 

Portrait of Paul Eluard
1929


 

The Bust of a Retrospective Woman
1933


 

The Bust of a Retrospective Woman
1933

 

The problem was that whenever Dali tried to talk to her, he went into a fit of laughter. The Lugubrious Game, featuring the underpants stained with excrement, was painted with such enthusiastic realism that friends and visitors wondered whether Dali had coprophagic tendencies. Gala decided to put an end to the speculation and met Dali for a walk along the cliffs, in the course of which the painter managed to restrain his laughter for once. In response to her question, he hesitated: "If I admitted to her that I was coprophagic, as they had suspected, it would make me even more interesting and phenomenal in everybody's eyes [...]" But Dali opted for the truth: "I swear to you that I am not 'coprophagic'. I consciously loathe that type of aberration as much as you can possibly loathe it. But I consider scatology a terrorizing element, just as I do blood, or my phobia for grasshoppers." The Surrealists were alarmed by the picture because of the excrement, and Georges Bataille saw "an appalling ugliness" in it. Bataille detected fears of castration in the painting: the body of the figure in the centre, intent on male dreams, has been torn apart. To its right, a besmirched figure is just escaping castration by "shameful and repellent" behaviour, while the figure on the left is "enjoying his own castration" and seeking a "poetic dimension". Dali rejected this interpretation, and indeed it led to a break between Bataille and the Surrealists.

"I want you to kill me!"
 

Despite his "timidity", Dali did contrive to put an arm around Gala's waist - though it was her hand then that took his. "This was the time to laugh, and I laughed with a nervousness heightened by the remorse which I knew beforehand the vexing inopportuneness of my reaction would cause me. But instead of being wounded by my laughter, Gala felt elated by it. For,, with an effort which must have been superhuman, she succeeded in again pressing my hand, even harder than before, instead of dropping it with disdain as anyone else would have done. With her medium-like intuition she had understood the exact meaning of my laughter, so inexplicable to everyone else. She knew that my laughter was altogether different from the usual 'gay' laughter. No, my laughter was not scepticism; it was fanaticism. My laughter was not frivolity; it was cataclysm, abyss, and terror. And of all the terrifying outbursts of laughter that she had already heard from me this, which I offered her in homage, was the most catastrophic, the one in which I threw myself to the ground at her feet, and from the greatest height! She said to me, 'My little boy! We shall never leave each other.'"

Dali himself provided the key, both historical and Freudian in character, to their love, which was born that very moment and lasted until death: "She was destined to be my Gradiva, 'she who advances', my victory, my wife. But for this she had to cure me, and she did cure me [...] solely through the heterogeneous, indomitable and unfathomable power of the love of a woman, canalized with a biological clairvoyance so refined and miraculous, exceeding in depth of thought and in practical results the most ambitious outcome of psychoanalytical methods." Not long before, Dali had read Wilhelm Jensen's novel Gradiva, which Sigmund Freud had analyzed in Delusion and Dreams. The heroine of the title, Gradiva, heals the male protagonist psychologically. "I knew," wrote Dali, "that I was approaching the 'great trial' of my life, the trial of love."

At this time, of such crucial importance in his emotional life, Dali was primarily engaged on another painting on the subject of desire: Accommodations of Desire. In it, desire is symbolized by lions' heads. Trembling, he asked Gala: "'What do you want me to do to you?' Then Gala, transforming the last glimmer of her expression of pleasure into the hard light of her own tyranny, answered, 'I want you to kill me!'" Dali noted: "One of the lightning-ideas that flashed into my mind was to throw Gala from the top of the bell-tower of the Cathedral of Toledo." But Gala, as we might predict, proved the stronger of the two: "Gala thus weaned me from my crime, and cured my madness. Thank you! I want to love you! I was to marry her. My hysterical symptoms disappeared one by one, as by enchantment. I became master again of my laughter, of my smile, and of my gestures. A new health, fresh as a rose, began to grow in the centre of my spirit."

 

Accomodations of Desire
1929

Man with Unhealthy Complexion Listening to the Sound of the Sea, or, The Two Balconies
1929

The Invisible Man
1929

 

Study for "The Invisible Man"
1929
 

Dali worked hard for a month, and then hired a joiner to crate his pictures for despatch to Paris, monitoring the work himself; the Goemans gallery was due to exhibit his work from 20 November to 5 December. Then, without a thought for the opening, he went to fetch Gala. Crazed with love, they left Paris two days before the opening and travelled to Barcelona, and then on to Sitges, a small seaside town. The most ambitious of contemporary artists, Dali had not even seen his work hung; and, indeed, he recalled that, on their travels, he and Gala were so busy with their own, physical exhibition that they had not a thought to spare for his exhibition of paintings.