|
|
|

|
 |
Art of the 20th Century
|
Art Styles
in 20th century Art Map
|
|
|
|
The Conquest of the Irrational
1936-1939
|
|
The Secret Drawers of the Unconscious
The drawers that open out of Dali's human and other
figures have become as universally familiar as his soft watches. The
Venus de Milo with Drawers or The Anthropomorphic
Cabinet have imprinted indelibly Dahnian images on the
visual memories of millions. Before painting the latter, Dali did a number
of detailed preparatory pencil and ink drawings. The painting was
conceived as a homage to the psychoanalytic theories of Freud, whom Dali
(unsurprisingly) revered. Dali viewed his own subject matter as an
allegorical means of tracing the countless narcissistic fragrances that
waft up from every one of our drawers (as he put it). And he declared that
the sole difference between immortal Greece and the present day was
Sigmund Freud, who had discovered that the human body, purely neo-Platonic
at the time of the Greeks, was now full of secret drawers which only
psychoanalysis could pull open. Dali was familiar with the furniture
figures made by the 17th century Italian Mannerist Giovanni Battista
Bracelli, and they doubtless influenced his own figures with drawers. For
Bracelli, though, furniture figures were a game played with geometry and
space, sheer jeu d'esprit, while for Dali, three centuries later, a
similar approach expressed the central, obsessive urge to understand human
identity.
|

The Anthropomorphic Cabinet
1936
|
|

The City of Drawers
1936 |
|

The City of Drawers - Study for the "Anthropomorphic Cabinet"
1936 |
|

The City of Drawers - Study for the "Anthropomorphic Cabinet"
1936 |

Venus De Milo with Drawers
1936 |

Venus de Milo with Drawers
1936 |
|

Woman with Drawers
1936
|

Ant Face. Drawing for the Catalogue Jacket of Dali's Exhibition
at the Alex
Reid and Lefevre Gallery in London
1936
|

Bust with Drawers
1936
|

Freudian Portrait of a Bureaucrat
1936
|
|
|
Dali's Surrealist dream objects bore the unmistakable
hallmark of his own unique personality, and took the Parisian art scene by
storm. Items such as the Aphrodisiac Dinner Jacket were first exhibited at Charles Ratton's in May 1936, then at the
International Surrealist Exhibition in London that July, and at Julien
Levy's in New York in December. At the same time Dali designed the cover
for the eighth issue of Minotaure - a typically
feminine Dalinian minotaur, complete with drawer and lobster - and
contributed key writings on art and aesthetics to the magazine. In "Le
Surrealisme spectral de Peternel feminin preraphaelite" (a title which
incorporated Goethe's "eternal feminine" and 19th century English art into
Dali's compass), he insisted that the aesthetic well-being of the mind
could only come from the body's health, from touching, eating and chewing.
Though the women in English Pre-Raphaelite art were at once the most
desirable and the most terrifying imaginable, they were nonetheless
creatures one might eat up - with the greatest of fear. To Dali, they
recalled "that legendary necrophiliac spring" of Botticelli, which he
considered acceptable in that it represented "the healthy flesh of myth"
but debatable in its failure to establish the splendour and material pomp
of occidental legend. Dali went on to assert that Pre-Raphaelite
morphology was a standing invitation to steep oneself in the bloody
entrails of the soul's aesthetic depths, and described Cezanne as "a kind
of Platonic mason" who "refused to recognise geodesic curvature".
|

Aphrodisiac Dinner Jacket
c. 1936
|

Aphrodisiac Dinner Jacket
1936
|
|

The cover of Time magazine,
December 14, 1936,
with a photograph of Dali taken in 1933.
Photograph: Man Ray
|

Exhibition of Surrealist objects at Charles Ratton"s, May 1936.
Right: "Aphrodisiac Dinner Jacket", 1936
|
|

Some of the extravagant Dali-inspired
hats for Elsa Schiaparelli,
1936: the cutlet hat, inkwell hat and shoe hat
|

Gala with the Elsa Schiaparelli shoe hat,
after designs by Dali, 1936
|
|

Lobster Telephone
1936
|

Cover of "Minotaure" Magazine
1936
|

Study for the Cover of "Minotaure", No. 8
1936
|

The Great Paranoiac
1936
|
|
At this point Dali went on to address his theory of
geodesic lines, declaring that Egyptian mummies had valuable lessons to
teach and going on to write of the art of clothing, which marks the
transitional point of access from the outer surface to the inner realm of
muscle and ultimately bone. Night and Day Clothes of the Body, an illustration intended for Harper's Bazaar or
Vogue, highlights Dali's meeting of various tensions: we cannot say
for certain where the body, clothing, or indeed wardrobe or window, begin
and end. The smock has a zip which enables two wing doors to be opened.
Dali was subsequently to remark that the tragic constant in human life was
fashion, which was why he so much enjoyed working with Chanel and
Schiaparelli. He believed that the concept of dressing was a consequence
of the most powerful trauma of all, the trauma of birth. Furthermore, he
felt that to watch models parading on show, and marching by, was to watch
angels of death heralding the approach of war.
"Le Surrealisme spectral de Peternel feminin
preraphaelite" was a core text at the time. Dali went on: "it is natural,
then, that when Salvador Dali speaks of his paranoiac-critical discoveries
in the field of visual representation, the Platonic beholders of the
eternal Cezanne apple do not take seriously what they consider a frenetic
way of wanting to touch everything (even the immaculate conception of
their apple) and, even worse, really to eat and chew everything, in one
way or another. But Salvador Dali will not stop crusading for this
hypermaterialist view, which is crucial to any and every epistemological
process in aesthetics that include the flesh and bone of biology - a view
of vast outsiderdom, a view of hegemonic disillusionment and of
sentimental exaltation."
|

Night and Day Clothes
1936
|

Geodesic Portrait of Gala
1936 |

Study for "Geodesic Portrait of Gala"
1936
|

Gala's Head - Rear View
1936
|

A Couple with Their Heads Full of Clouds
1936 |

Gala and Dali with
"A Couple with Their Heads Full of Clouds ". Photograph: Cecil Beaton
1936 |

Study for "A Couple with Their Heads Full of Clouds " (detail)
1936
|
|

Man with His Head Full of Clouds
1936
|